Download SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION
Robert M. Krauss
Department of Psychology
Schermerhorn Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
(212) 854-3949
[email protected]
Susan R. Fussell
Department of Psychology
Magruder Hall
Mississippi State University
P.O. Box 6161
Mississippi State, MS 39762
(601) 325-7657
[email protected]
Models of Interpersonal Communication
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Running Head: MODELS OF COMMUNICATION
To appear in E.T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social Psychology:
Handbook of Basic Principles. New York: Guilford Press.
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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION†
Robert M. Krauss and Susan R. Fussell
Columbia University and Mississippi State University
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Communication and Social Psychology
Social psychology traditionally has been defined as the study of the
ways in which people affect, and are affected by, others.1 Communication
is one of the primary means by which people affect one another, and, in
light of this, one might expect the study of communication to be a core
topic of social psychology, but historically that has not been the case.
No doubt there are many reasons. Among them is the fact that
communication is a complex and multidisciplinary concept, and, across the
several disciplines that use the term, there is no consensus on exactly how
it should be defined. It is an important theoretical construct in such
otherwise dissimilar fields as cell biology, computer science, ethology,
linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics,
philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. And although there is a core of
meaning common to the way the term is used in these disciplines, the
particularities differ enormously. What cell biologists call communication
bears little resemblance to what anthropologists study under the same
rubric. A concept used in so many different ways runs the risk of
becoming an amorphous catch-all term lacking precise meaning, and that
already may have happened to communication. As the sociologist Thomas
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Luckmann has observed, "Communication has come to mean all things to
all men" (Luckmann, 1993, p. 68).
Despite this, for social psychologists communication (or some
equivalent notion) remains an indispensable concept. It's difficult to
imagine serious discussions of such topics as social influence, small group
interaction, social perception, attitude change, or interpersonal relations
that ignore the role communication plays. Yet such discussions typically
pay little attention to the specific mechanisms by means of which the
process works.
An instructive parallel can be drawn between the way contemporary
social psychologists think about communication and the way an earlier
generation of social psychologists thought about cognition. It was not
unusual in the late 1970s, when social cognition was beginning to emerge
as an important theoretical focus, for social psychologists of an earlier
generation to observe that social psychology had always been cognitive in
its orientation, so that a focus on social cognition was really nothing new.
There was some truth to this claim. Even in the hey-day of Behaviorism,
social psychologists really never accepted the doctrine that all behavior,
social and otherwise, could be explained without invoking what
Behaviorists disparagingly termed "mentalistic" concepts (Deutsch &
Krauss, 1965). Indeed, the concepts that defined the field (attitude, belief,
expectation, value, impressions, etc.) were cognitive by their very nature.
The point is well taken as far as it goes, but it fails to acknowledge the
differences between the implicitly cognitive outlook of the earlier social
psychology and the study of social cognition. In the former, it was
assumed that cognition underpinned virtually all of the processes studied.
The ability to think, perceive, remember, categorize and so forth were
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assumed to be capacities of the normal person, and little attention was paid
to the specific details of how these mental operations were accomplished.
In order for messages to change attitudes, people must be able to
understand them, remember them, think about them, etc. It was assumed
that people could and would do these things; exactly how was not thought
to be of great consequence.
In contrast, underlying the study of social cognition (as that term has
come to be understood) is the assumption that the particular mechanisms
by which cognition is accomplished are themselves important determinants
of the outcome of the process. For example, particularities of the structure
of human memory, and of the processes of encoding and retrieval, can
affect what will or will not be recalled. One consequence of this difference
in emphasis can be seen in an example. In the earlier social psychology,
negative stereotypes of disadvantaged minorities were understood as
instances of motivated perceptual distortion deriving from majority group
members’ needs, interests and goals (Allport, 1954). More recently,
however, it has been shown that such stereotypes can arise simply from the
way people process information about others, and that invidious motives
or conflict are unnecessary for their development (Andersen, Klatsky, &
Murray, 1990; Hamilton & Sherman, 1989). While motivation and conflict
probably do often play a role in the development of pejorative group
stereotypes, apparently it is not a necessary condition for their emergence.
(For a historical review of research in this area, see Rothbart & Lewis, 1994.)
In much the same way, contemporary social psychologists
acknowledge that communication mediates much social behavior, but seem
willing to assume that it gets accomplished, and display little interest in
how it occurs. Their focus is on content, not process. As a result, they may
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fail to appreciate how the communication situation their experiment
represents affects the behavior they observe. Recent work by Schwarz,
Strack and their colleagues illustrates some consequences of this oversight
(Bless, Strack, & Schwarz, 1993; Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991b;
Strack & Schwarz, 1993; Strack, Schwarz, & Wänke, 1991). For example,
Strack et al. (1991) elicited subjects’ responses to two similar items: (1)
"How happy are you with your life as a whole?" and "How satisfied are
you with your life as a whole?" For one group of subjects, the two
questions were asked in different, unrelated questionnaires; for the other
group, the questions were asked in the same questionnaire, set off from the
other items in a box labeled "Here are some questions about your life."
Other things being equal, one would expect responses to the two
items to be highly correlated. Although happy and satisfied are not
synonymous, they bear many similarities in meaning; certainly there are
circumstances that can make one happy but not satisfied, and vice versa,
but people who are happy with their lives tend also to be satisfied with
their lives. When the two items were presented in separate questionnaires
the correlation between responses to them was 0.96, which probably is
close to the items' test–retest reliability. However, when the two items
were presented successively in the same questionnaire, the correlation was
significantly lower — r = 0.65. At first glance, the result seems anomalous.
Other things being equal, the closer two items in a questionnaire are, the
greater the correlation we would expect between their responses to be.
However, as Strack et al. point out, viewing the two items from a
communicative perspective alters these expectations considerably.
Consider the following question-answer sequences as part of dyadic
conversations:
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Conversation A
Q: How is your family?
A: . . . . . .
Conversation B
Q: How is your wife?
A: . .
.
.
.
Q: How is your family?
A: .
.
. .
.
.
In Conversation A, we would expect the respondent to take his wife's
well-being into account in answering the question "How is your family?"
but in Conversation B we would expect him to exclude his wife’s wellbeing when answering the same question, since that already had been
established (Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991a). Schwarz and
Strack derive this prediction from a set of conversational maxims (Grice,
1975) -- rules to which participants in conversations must conform in order
to understand, and be understood by, their coparticipants.2 To the extent
that respondents in the Strack et al. (1991) experiment responded to the
questionnaire as though it were governed by the conversational maxims,
presenting the Happiness and Satisfaction questions in the same context
induced respondents to base their answers on the distinctive aspects of the
two content domains. Failing to understand the questionnaire as a kind of
communication situation could yield quite misleading results.3
The social psychologists of an earlier generation who assumed that
cognition underpinned the processes they studied were using a model of
cognition, however sketchily detailed it may have been. In many cases this
implicit cognitive model was adequate to support a serviceable explanation
of the social behavior under consideration, but in other cases their
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understanding of the social process was defective because it rested on
inappropriate assumptions about the underlying cognitive process. In a
similar way, contemporary social psychologists who assume that
communication is involved in the phenomena they study, but do not
consider the specific details of its operation, are implicitly assuming a
model of communication. In most cases the assumptions they make about
communication may be adequate, but when they are not, the
understanding of the phenomena under examination will be defective. For
this reason, we think it behooves all social psychologists, regardless of their
substantive interests, to be familiar with the processes that underlie
communication.
This chapter will review four models of interpersonal communication
and some of the research that they have motivated. As was noted above,
communication is an incorrigibly interdisciplinary concept, and saying
something useful about it in a single chapter requires a considerable
narrowing of focus. Despite the length of this chapter, we have had to
forego discussing a good deal of relevant work, and to discuss most of the
studies we describe in anything like the detail they warrant.
The term model is used in a number of quite different ways in science
(Lachman, 1960). It can refer both to rather diffuse theoretical perspectives
(e.g., "models of man") and to highly specific theoretical descriptions (e.g.,
"stochastic models of dual-task performance"). We are using the term in
the former sense, to point to commonalties of assumptions and emphasis in
the approaches different investigators have taken in studying
communication. The four kinds of models we will discuss each constitute
one way of imposing some measure of order on a very heterogeneous
corpus of theory and research. In many cases, the model is implicit in the
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investigator's approach to the research rather than a position that is stated
explicitly. We have tried to formulate the assumptions that underlie an
investigator's approach to communicative phenomena, and, based on these
assumptions, to identify the type of model that approach represents. As in
most classificatory endeavors, some exemplars fit better than others.
Although we have tried to avoid being Procrustean, we would not be
surprised if some investigators disagreed with our characterization of their
work.
The four classes of models we will discuss are Encoder/Decoder
models, Intentionalist models, Perspective-taking models, and Dialogic
models. These models, and the research they motivate, differ on a variety
of dimensions, and we will elaborate on these in the sections below. But
one fundamental respect in which they differ is where they locate meaning.
For Encoder/Decoder models, meaning is a property of messages, for
Intentionalist models it resides in speakers' intentions, for Perspectivetaking models it derives from an addressee's point of view, and for
Dialogic models meaning is an emergent property of the participants' joint
activity.
We focus on models that conceive of communication as a social
psychological phenomenon, by which we mean models that conceptualize
communication as result of complementary processes that operate at the
intrapersonal and interpersonal levels. At the intrapersonal level,
communication involves processes that enable participants to produce and
comprehend messages. At the interpersonal level, communication involves
processes that cause participants simultaneously to affect, and to be
affected by, one another. The aim of a social psychological model is to
explain how the two sets of processes operate in concert.
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1.2 Defining Communication: Some Options And Problems
Common to all conceptions of communication is the idea that
information is transmitted from one part of a system to another, but
beyond that, even within the disciplines that focus on human
communication, there is little agreement as to just how the concept should
be defined. One reason it is so difficult to formulate a satisfactory
definition of human communication is that different kinds of
communicative acts seem to convey information in quite different ways,
and there are a number of alternative conceptualizations of these
differences. In understanding this, it is helpful to think of two rather
different ways that acts can convey information. Imagine the response
elicited by an embarrassing situation. One response might be to say "This
is terribly embarrassing." Another response might be to blush
conspicuously, while saying nothing. We will refer to any behavior
(including an act of speaking) that conveys information as a signal. Both
blushing and saying "This is very embarrassing" might be thought of as
signals signifying an internal state of embarrassment. Blushing is an
example of a sign or expressive behavior; the sentence "This is terribly
embarrassing" is an example of a symbol or symbolic behavior. Although
both behaviors convey similar information — that the person is
embarrassed — they do so in quite different ways. Sign and symbol differ
both as to the process by which they are produced and the process by
which they are understood, and these differences have important
consequences for the way they function in communication. Some of these
differences are considered in the next section.
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1.2.1 Attributes Of Signs And Symbols
Conventional vs. causal significance
A symbol is a signal (behavioral or otherwise) that stands for, or
signifies, something other than itself. A symbol's significance (i.e., what it
stands for) is the product of a social convention. Typically the connection
between a symbol and what it signifies is more-or-less arbitrary 4 -- the
symbol represents the thing it signifies because some community of symbol
users implicitly has agreed to use it in this way.
A sign is another kind of signal that stands for something other than
itself. Unlike a symbol, however, a sign bears an intrinsic relationship to
the thing it signifies. Sign and thing signified are causally related; they are
products of the same process. People blush because of a (not-completelyunderstood) physiological process that is part of the physiological response
to embarrassing and similar kinds of situations (Leary & Meadows, 1991).
Blushing signifies that the person is embarrassed because blushing is a
product of the internal state that constitutes embarrassment. Saying "I'm
embarrassed" signifies that the person is embarrassed because English
language users implicitly have agreed that is what those words mean.
Intentional vs. involuntary usage
By definition, symbol use is an intentional act. Using a symbol
involves voluntarily choosing to use it and knowing the meaning the
symbol conveys. To comprehend the meaning conveyed by a symbol, one
specifically must assume that its use was intentional -- that the person
intended to convey whatever it is the symbol is understood to mean (Grice,
1969). It is possible for someone to display a symbol without knowing its
meaning, as sometimes happens when a child repeats something an adult
has said, but we would not regard that as an instance of symbol use. In
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contrast, signs do not require the assumption of intention. Indeed, many
signs are involuntary, and one has little control over them. Although
blushing may serve an important social function (Castelfranchi & Poggi,
1990; Leary & Meadows, 1991), even people who blush readily cannot
blush at will, nor can they suppress blushing when they are embarrassed.
Because of this difference in intentionality, signals consisting of
symbols have an peculiar dual quality that signals consisting of signs may
lack. As an activity, symbol use consists of displaying a symbol (uttering a
word, making a gesture, etc.). But by virtue of the symbol's meaning, it
also constitutes an act of another kind. The panhandler who approaches a
prospective donor with hand extended is displaying a symbol (in this case,
a symbol of supplication) and at the same time is asking for money. By
means of symbol systems (especially language) we can perform such acts
as requesting, promising, asserting, threatening, etc. (Austin, 1962; Bach &
Harnish, 1979; Searle, 1969). Because the symbolic behavior is understood
to be intentional -- indeed, attributing meaning to a symbol someone has
used requires the assumption that its use was intentional -- the user
automatically incurs the responsibility of having intended to communicate
the symbol's meaning. 5 Having said "This is terribly embarrassing," the
person in the example is responsible for having made that information
public. The person whose embarrassment is conveyed by blushing does
not incur this responsibility. As Goffman (1967) has noted, certain
nonverbal behaviors are socially useful precisely because they enable one
to convey information without incurring the responsibility of having done
so.
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Processes of comprehension
Understanding (i.e., deriving significance from) symbols and signs
draws upon different kinds of knowledge. We understand signs because of
things we know about the world. In the example, we know the person is
embarrassed because we know that blushing and embarrassment are
causally related. Based on this knowledge, we can understand a particular
instance of blushing by making a causal attribution to its source. It would
not be necessary to know what the word embarrassed meant to understand
the significance of blushing; nor would it be necessary to know what kinds
of situations people find embarrassing. Indeed, we may infer that an
individual finds a particular kind of situation embarrassing from the
observation that he or she blushes when in it.
In contrast, we understand symbolic behaviors because of things we
know about the symbol system -- in the example, because of things we
know about the English language. The sentence "This is embarrassing" is
understandable even if we happened to be unaware that the specific
situation was a potential source of embarrassment, or that embarrassment
is frequently accompanied by blushing. We will call the process by which
we understand the meaning of symbolic behaviors communicative inference.
Signs are understood by a process of causal attribution.
Processes of production
Symbol use is learned behavior. Although there is considerable
evidence that humans have a distinct propensity to acquire and use certain
symbol systems, especially so language (Chomsky, 1968; 1992; Pinker, 1984,
1994), the ability to produce them communicatively requires exposure,
often of a considerable duration. We do not have to learn to produce signs,
although social experience can modify how they are displayed.
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1.2.2 Definitional Issues
One respect in which conceptualizations of communication differ is
precisely on the issue of how to deal with the distinction between symbolic
and expressive behaviors. Ekman and Friesen (1969) and Wiener, Devoe,
Rubinow, and Geller (1972) , for example, would restrict the term
communication to symbol use. (Ekman and Friesen refer to information
conveyed by signs as informative, rather than communicative.) In the view
of Wiener et al., communication requires "...(a) a socially shared signal
system, that is, a code, (b) an encoder who makes something public via that
code, and (c) a decoder who responds systematically to that code" (Wiener
et al., 1972) The opposite view is offered by Watzlawick, Beavin and
Jackson, who explicitly do not distinguish between symbolic and
expressive behaviors as sources of information in communication:
...it should be made clear from the outset that the two terms
communication and behavior are used virtually
synonymously...Thus, from this perspective...all behavior, not only
speech, is communication, and all communication—even the
communicational clues in an impersonal context—affects behavior
(Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967, p. 22).
Both positions present serious problems when one tries to implement them
theoretically. The definition proposed by Watzlawick et al. reminds us that
any behavior, under the appropriate circumstances, potentially is capable of
conveying information. If one's goal is to characterize the information
potentially available in a situation, a definition along the lines of the one
proposed by Watzlawick et al. may be useful. However, if the focus is on
the information that actually affects the participants in the situation, a
degree of differentiation probably is necessary.
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The problem with a definition as broad as the one offered by
Watzlawick et al. is that it fails to distinguish between the behaviors that
are most significant in communication and those that are of little or no
importance. It holds that all behavior is communication, so long as it
occurs in a social situation. One implication of this view is that to
understand communication, everything the individual does must be taken
into account — a prescription that doesn't lead to a practical research
strategy. Perhaps more important, neither does it describe what
communicators actually do. Individuals involved in a conversation do not,
and probably could not, pay equal attention to all of their conversational
partners' behaviors, and their selective attention makes sense. All of the
partner's behaviors are not equally informative, and people's capacity to
process information is limited. By trying to attend to everything the other
party did, a communicator would in all likelihood miss the main point of
the message.
The problems with restricting the term communication to symbolic
behavior may be less immediately apparent, but they are no less real. Since
Wiener et al. have tried to define what they mean in a formal way, it is their
position we will examine, but our comments apply equally well to the
distinction drawn by Ekman and Friesen. For Wiener et al.,
communication is defined by the use of a code. What is a code? They
propose four criteria, and indicate why each is important:
A. The behaviors must be emitted by the particular communication
group studied. This criterion eliminates idiosyncratic behaviors and
meets the requirements of socially shared behaviors.
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B. The behaviors must occur in several different contexts. This
criterion is likely to eliminate some which are reactions to a specific
set of stimulus conditions.
C. The behaviors must be more likely to occur in verbal contexts than
in any and all other contexts. If a behavior (e. g., scratching) can
occur in any context –– that is, with or without an addressee –– it is
difficult to accept it as a possible component in a communication
code.
D. The behaviors as code components should encompass a relatively
short time duration. This criterion serves to focus on ongoing
experience rather than on socially prescribed patterns of behavior or
on behavior related to personality styles (e. g., the wearing of rings or
the handling of teacups) (Wiener et al., 1972, p. 209).
Although the subject of the Wiener et al. paper is nonverbal
communication, their conception of communication is based on spoken
language. They point to a small number of hand gestures (e. g., waving
"good-bye," pointing at the addressee to mean "you," the palms-out gesture
that can be taken to mean "don't interrupt") that, by their criteria, could be
classified as communication, but they argue it is ultimately an empirical
question. Such a definition has the not-insignificant virtue of being clear
about what is communication and what is not, but its restrictiveness is
problematic. The definitional boundaries are arbitrary, and as a
consequence, many behaviors that are intrinsic to human communication
are excluded. For example, the definition would exclude facial expressions,
which occur in both nonlinguistic and nonsocial contexts. Yet, facial
expression is a powerfully effective means of conveying certain kinds of
information, and is used universally for that purpose (Ekman, 1972; Ekman
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& Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, Diacoyanni-Tarlatziz, Krause,
Pitcairn, et al., 1987; Izard, 1977).
Similarly, such commonly-used symbols as wearing a wedding ring
to indicate that one is married or a black armband to signify that one is in
mourning — displays whose meanings are understood by virtually
everyone in a culture, and understood to be intended to convey that
meaning — are not considered communication by this definition.
However, it would certainly be incorrect to regard these behaviors as
signs. Like words and certain gestures, they are products of social
conventions—learned, used intentionally, understood by virtue of
knowledge of the conventional system, and so forth. It is not clear in what
theoretically important respect they are different from the gesture that
signifies "good-bye." Accepting the Wiener et al. definition would seem to
require a new category of signals that would be regarded as neither
communication (in their terms) nor signs, involving such symbols as
wedding rings, military uniforms, political campaign buttons, and the like.
1.2.3 Distinguishing Between Sign And Symbol
There is a fundamental problem with the attempt to distinguish
between signals that utilize symbols and those that utilize signs implicit in
both Wiener et al's. and Ekman and Friesen's approach: although the
difference between sign and symbol seems clear theoretically, in practice,
more often than not the distinction can't be drawn in a principled way..
Signs used symbolically
Blushing was chosen as an illustrative expressive behavior because it
so nicely fits the specifications of a sign -- there can be little doubt that it is
unlearned, involuntary, causally related to what it signifies, etc. These
properties make it a good example, but blushing really is atypical in the
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degree to which it is involuntary. For other signs, involuntariness is less
clear. Crying, for example, is ordinarily involuntary, but it can be
suppressed to some degree, and some people are able to simulate a pretty
convincing episode, complete with real tears.
Consider facial expression, perhaps the most socially important sign,
and the subject of considerable research. Like blushing and yawning, facial
expression can be a sign of an internal psychological state, and, as such, it
appears to be unlearned, involuntary, etc. However, unlike blushing, facial
expression is very much subject to voluntarily control. To a considerable
extent, we can suppress facial expressions when we don't want others to
know what we're feeling, and we can simulate them when we want others
to believe we are experiencing a feeling we really are not (DePaulo,
Rosenthal, Green, & Rosenkrantz, 1982; Ekman & Friesen, 1974; Krauss,
1981; Kraut, 1978). One of the child's important tasks in social
development is to bring his or her expressive behavior under voluntary
control (Morency & Krauss, 1982). Most children eventually learn not to
express their disgust facially when presented with a portion of spinach or
squid, regardless of how loathsome they find the food. There is
considerable evidence that facial expressiveness is very much under control
in social situations, and is more likely to represent what the individual
would like others to believe he or she is feeling than the feelings actually
being experienced (Kraut, 1979).6 Facial expression, then, might be thought
of as a sign (or set of signs) that can be used symbolically, and it is not
always easy to tell which type of signal is being displayed on a specific
occasion. The same can be said for most expressive behaviors.
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Symbol use that functions expressively
In a similar fashion, symbolic behaviors can function as signs. The
so-called "Freudian slip" is a vivid example of language use that is both
unintended and meaningful. Most slips of the tongue probably reflect
relatively simple breakdowns of the speech production process (Fromkin,
1973; Garrett, 1980), and are not particularly revealing of anything beyond
that. For example, speakers sometimes exchange word fragments, as when
a colleague of ours recently referred to the main Thanksgiving Day activity
as "Turking the roastey." However, on occasion unintentionally uttered
words or phrases can express a thought the speaker had not intended to
make public. One place this can occur is in "blends" -- speech errors in
which two words are fused into one. Blends usually occur when two
semantically-related words compete for the same syntactic slot (lecture +
lesson --> lection). It sometimes happens, however, that the blended words
have little in common semantically, and the blend is due to competing
plans for the conceptual content of what is to be expressed (Butterworth,
1982, Levelt, 1989). In The psychopathology of everyday life, Freud (described
in Levelt, 1989, p. 217) reported on a patient commenting: "Dan aber sind
Tatsachen zum Vorschwein gekommen," ["But then facts come to
Vorschwein"]. Vorschwein is a blend of the German words, Vorschein
(appearance) and Schweinereien (filthiness). When questioned, the speaker
agreed that the idea of filthiness was on his mind, and had intruded itself
into what was intended to be a neutral comment about someone's
appearance.
Slips of the tongue may be useful grist for the psychoanalytic mill,
but more important from the standpoint of communication is the aspect of
speech called paralanguage. Speech contains verbal information in the form
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of words set in their syntactic matrix; a faithful transcript of speech consists
almost exclusively of verbal information. But speech also conveys another
kind of information. Vocal information is the name given to what remains
in speech when verbal information has been removed — the paralanguage,
which consists of such acoustic properties of the speech signal as pitch,
loudness, articulation rate, and variations in these properties.7
When we listen to speech, we normally hear a combination of verbal
and vocal information, but it is possible to process speech electronically in
a way that makes its content unintelligible but preserves most of the
paralinguistic information (Rogers, Scherer, & Rosenthal, 1971). Such
"content-filtered" speech can convey a great deal of information, principally
about the speaker's emotional state, and judgments made by naive listeners
from unfiltered speech of a speaker's emotional state seems to take such
information into account (Burns & Beier, 1973; Krauss, Apple, Morency,
Wenzel, & Winton, 1981; Scherer, Koivumaki, & Rosenthal, 1972). In faceto-face interaction, participants have a rich variety of visual information
available to them in addition to verbal and vocal information. Some of this
information may have symbolic value (e.g., religious ornaments, uniforms,
clothing whose style "makes a statement"), and some of the information
(e.g., blushing) is in the form of signs. To complicate matters, visual
information like gestures and facial expression combines symbol and sign
elements in a way that cannot easily be disentangled.
Thus, although the theoretical distinction between symbol and sign
seems clear in the abstract, in practice it is a difficult one to draw, and it
may be more useful to think of signs and symbols as representing two
poles of a continuum rather than discrete categories. Most signals combine
several elements that vary in their position on the continuum, and signals
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that are "pure" symbol or sign probably are the exceptions rather than the
norm.
Where does this leave us in our effort to define communication?
Unfortunately, we have no simple answer. If we define communication to
include only signals composed of symbols that are intended to convey
information (as do Wiener et al.), we are faced with the problem that in
most messages sign and symbol are inextricably intertwined. On the other
hand, if we take the position of Watzlawick et al. that all behavior
performed in the presence of another constitutes communication, we have
no principled way of distinguishing between speech and eye blinks.
Perhaps a more helpful approach is to ask what communication does rather
than on what communication is. Sperber and Wilson have offered such a
definition that avoids some of the problems we have reviewed above.
They define communication as:
…a process involving two information-processing devices. One
device modifies the physical environment of the other. As a result,
the second device constructs representations similar to the
representations already stored in the first device (Sperber & Wilson,
1986, p. 1).
Sperber and Wilson's definition focuses on the central role of internal
representations in communication, while leaving open the question of
precisely how the representations stored in one device come to be
constructed by the second device. One way of thinking about the four
models of communication we describe below is that they are different
characterizations of this aspect of the process.
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2. THE ENCODER/DECODER MODEL
2.1 Introduction
Perhaps the most straightforward conceptualization of
communication can be found in what we will call the Encoder/Decoder
model. A code is a system that maps a set of signals onto a set of
significates or meanings.8 In the simplest kind of code, the mapping is oneto-one: for every signal there is one and only one meaning; for every
meaning, there is one and only one signal. Morse code is a familiar
example of a simple code. In it the signals are sequences of short and long
pulses (dots and dashes) and the significates are the 26 letters of the English
alphabet, the digits 0-9, and certain punctuation marks. In Morse code, the
sequence
••••
"means" the letter H, and only that; conversely, the letter H
is represented by the sequence
• • • •,
and only that sequence.
Encoding/decoding models view communication as a process in
which the internal representation is encoded (i.e., transformed into code)
by one information processing device (the source) and transmitted over a
channel, where it is received by the other information processing device
(the destination) and decoded as a representation. Encoding and decoding
are the means by which information processing devices affect, and are
affected by, the other. The process is illustrated schematically in Figure 1.
----------------------------------------------------------Insert Figure 1 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------In speech communication, the message passes between people,
referred to as speaker (or sender) and addressee (or listener, hearer or
receiver). 9 In verbal communication, the source and encoder are contained
within the skin of the speaker, and the decoder and destination within the
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skin of the addressee. In such cases both source and destination are the
declarative and procedural memories of the persons functioning as speaker
and addressee, and the encoder and decoder are the complex faculties
involved in the production and comprehension of speech. In
contemporary psycholinguistic theory, the two are often regarded as
separate faculties or modules (Fodor, 1983, 1987; Levelt, 1989; MarslenWilson & Tyler, 1981). The speaker's mental representation is transformed
into a verbal or linguistic representation by means of the speaker's
linguistic encoder, and it is the linguistic representation that is transmitted
via speech. By decoding the linguistic representation, the addressee is able
to create a mental representation that corresponds, at least in some
respects, to the mental representation of the speaker.
Of course, the mental representations of speaker and listener may
differ in some respects. There are a number of possible sources of such
dissimilarity. For example, speaker and addressee may have different
understandings of some of the terms in the linguistic representation. Or
the addressee may understand the terms in the linguistic representation
correctly, but apply them incorrectly in constructing the mental
representation. Or the speaker may omit details from the linguistic
representation that are necessary to construct the mental representation,
and the addressee may "fill them in" incorrectly. Indeed, it is well
established that such "filling in," accomplished by means of schemata,
scripts and other pre-existing knowledge structures, is essential to
language comprehension and to the recall of information that has been
communicated to us (Bartlett, 1932; Bransford & Franks, 1971; Neisser,
1967; Schank & Abelson, 1977).
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An Encoder/Decoder model exemplifies the application of principles
of information theory (Shannon & Weaver, 1949; Wiener, 1948) to human
communication. In information theory the function of the signals
transmitted from source to destination is the reduction of uncertainty. To
the extent that a message is informative, the destination is less uncertain
after receiving the message than before, and information theory provides a
means of specifying in quantitative terms the informational content of a
message (e.g., the amount of uncertainty it is capable of reducing), at least
for messages that meet the theory's requirements. Information theory is the
theoretical cornerstone of modern information technology, and as such
constitutes one of most important scientific insights of this century.
2.2 Research Findings
Notwithstanding this, apart from some useful general concepts and a
set of terms that can be handy when applied loosely, information theory
has not contributed importantly to the study of human communication.
The aspect of the theory that has had greatest scientific impact is its ability
to characterize information in an abstract, quantitative way. And a major
impediment in using the theory to describe human communication is that,
for a particular message transmitted at a particular time to a particular
receiver, more often than not we are at a loss to specify just what
uncertainty (if any) has been reduced.10 In this section we describe several
areas of research which are at least tangentially influenced by the
Encoder/Decoder model: early studies of the codability of objects and
concepts, research on nonverbal and vocal communication, and recent
work on the linguistic bases of causal attribution.
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2.2.1 Studies of Codability
The Encoder/Decoder model, and at least the indirect influence of
information theory, can be seen in the terminology of early studies of
verbal communication. In what was to become a classic study of the role of
language in thought, Brown and Lenneberg (1954) observed that a color's
codability (essentially interpersonal agreement as to what it should be
called) predicted how well it would be remembered. Lantz and Stefflre
(1964) demonstrated that a color's codability was related to its
communication accuracy—the accuracy with which subjects could select the
color based on a name provided by someone else. Although neither
Brown and Lenneberg nor Lantz and Stefflre used this approach, both
codability and communication accuracy could readily have been expressed
in terms of H, the information theoretic measure of uncertainty. Other
investigators applied the codability measure to random line drawings
(Graham, 1975) and facial expressions of emotion (Frijda, 1961).
Codability, as conceived by Brown and Lenneberg, was a property of
a stimulus, but research soon made it clear that what a color was called on
a particular occasion of usage (hence, its codability score) was not a simple
consequence of its physical properties, and could vary with variety of other
factors. These included properties of the colors from which it was to be
distinguished (Krauss & Weinheimer, 1967), whether the name was
intended for the person who named it or some other person (Innes, 1976;
Krauss, Vivekananthan, & Weinheimer, 1968), the purpose that naming the
color served (Danks, 1970), and whether naming occurred as part of a
monologue or a dialogue (Krauss & Weinheimer, 1967). Such studies
demonstrated that the determinants of a color's codability were as much
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pragmatic (i.e., based on the communicative function the utterance was
designed to serve) as they were a function of its physical properties.
2.2.2 Nonverbal Communication
As a result of these and other considerations, studies of verbal
communication more often have employed the Encoder/Decoder rhetoric
than committed themselves fully to its implications (Boomer, 1965;
Dittmann & Llewellyn, 1967; Glucksberg & Cohen, 1968; Glucksberg,
Krauss, & Higgins, 1975; Glucksberg, Krauss, & Weisberg, 1966; Hupet &
Chantraine, 1992; Hupet, Seron, & Chantraine, 1991; Krauss & Bricker,
1966; Krauss, Garlock, Bricker, & McMahon, 1977; Krauss & Weinheimer,
1966; Mangold & Pobel, 1989; Mercer, 1976; Rosch, 1977). However,
although the Encoder/Decoder model no longer figures importantly in
discussions of verbal communication, it probably is the dominant
viewpoint of researchers studying nonverbal communication (cf. DePaulo,
Rosenthal, Eisenstat, Rogers, & Finkelstein, 1978; Ekman & Friesen, 1969;
Lanzetta & Kleck, 1970; Mehrabian & Wiener, 1967; Riseborough, 1981;
Woodall & Folger, 1981; Zuckerman, Hall, DeFrank, & Rosenthal, 1976).
The approach to defining communication by Wiener et al. (1972) discussed
earlier was intended to provide a formal theoretical basis for identifying
nonverbal behaviors that are communicative. In it, encoding and decoding
are the defining features of communication.
The idea that nonverbal behaviors encode messages (especially
messages about the speaker's internal state) probably derives from
Darwin's proposal about the origin of facial expressions (Darwin, 1872;
Fridlund, in press). Darwin argued that human facial expressions are
vestiges of serviceable associated habits — behaviors that were functional at
one time in our evolutionary history. Baring the teeth when angered
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originally was a prelude to an aggressive attack in our evolutionary
ancestors, and the human facial expression that "encodes" anger is a vestige
of that habitual response. According to Darwin's intellectual successors,
the behavioral ethologists (e.g., Hinde, 1972; Tinbergen, 1952), over time
such responses acquired sign value by providing external evidence of an
organism's internal state. The utility of this information for a species
generated evolutionary pressure to select these sign behaviors, thereby
schematizing them and, in Tinbergen's phrase, "emancipating them" from
their original biological functions. Students of nonverbal communication
have invested considerable effort investigating such topics as the
relationship of nonverbal behavior and internal state (Condon, 1980;
Cosmides, 1983; DePaulo, Kirkendol, & Tang, 1988; Edelman & Hampson,
1979; Ekman & Friesen, 1969, 1971; Ekman, Friesen, O'Sullivan, & Scherer,
1980; Fairbanks & Pronovost, 1939; Kimble & Seidel, 1991; Lanzetta &
Kleck, 1970; Montepare, Goldstein, & Clausen, 1987; Putnam, Winton, &
Krauss, 1982; Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988; Streeter, Macdonald, Apple,
Krauss, & Galotti, 1983; Williams & Stevens, 1972; Woodall & Folger, 1981;
Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981), factors affecting the accuracy
with which people can decode nonverbal behaviors (Archer & Akert, 1977;
Burns & Beier, 1973; DePaulo et al., 1978; DePaulo et al., 1982; Ekman &
Friesen, 1969; Krauss et al., 1981; Lanzetta & Kleck, 1970; Morency &
Krauss, 1982; Rimé, 1982; Scherer et al., 1972; Zuckerman et al., 1981),
individual differences in the ability to encode or decode nonverbal
information (Archer & Akert, 1977; Cunningham, 1977; Morency & Krauss,
1982; Rosenthal & DePaulo, 1979), etc. (For representative reviews and
theoretical discussions see DePaulo, 1992; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Feldman
& Rimé, 1991; Hinde, 1972; McDowall, 1978; Patterson, 1976).
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2.2.3 Vocal Information in Speech
The Encoder/Decoder perspective has also been applied to studies of
vocal information in speech. Although speech is used primarily to convey
what might be thought of as verbal information (roughly, the information
that would be contained in a good transcript), a speaker's voice conveys
considerable information about the speaker, quite apart from what he or
she says. Collectively this sort of information has been referred to as vocal
information, and includes both those vocal qualities that are relatively
permanent and those qualities that vary with the speaker's internal state.
Among the first type are qualities that result from the architecture and
condition of the speaker's vocal tract and provide information about the
speaker's age, gender and size (Cohen, Crystal, House, & Neuberg, 1980;
Gradol & Swann, 1983; Lass & Davis, 1976; Lass & Harvey, 1976; Lass,
Hughes, Bowyer, Waters, & Bourne, 1976). Other relatively stable vocal
qualities are associated with regional and intra-regional status dialects. It
might be said that a speaker's age, gender, and socioeconomic status is
encoded in his or her voice, even when speech content is itself
uninformative. And people hearing the speech can, without training, do an
impressive job of decoding this nonverbal information. For example, Ellis
(1967) had undergraduates judge speakers' socioeconomic status after
listening to recordings of them reading a standard passage. The correlation
between judged and actual status (as measured by the Index of Status
Characteristics) was +0.80; even when the speech samples consisted of
counting from 1-10, the correlation between judged and actual status was
+0.65. There is abundant evidence that such vocally-encoded information
plays an important role in how the speaker is evaluated (Scherer & Giles,
1979).
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In addition to these relatively stable voice qualities that permit
identification of relatively stable attributes of speakers, variations withinspeaker can reflect (among other things) changes in internal state. A
speaker's affective state is reflected in vocal quality (Cosmides, 1983;
Fairbanks & Pronovost, 1939; Scherer, 1986; Streeter et al., 1983; Williams &
Stevens, 1969; Williams & Stevens, 1972), and perceivers can identify these
states with reasonable accuracy (Burns & Beier, 1973; Ekman et al., 1980;
Krauss et al., 1981; Scherer et al., 1972).
2.2.4 Interpersonal Verbs and Implicit Causality
Some of the most sophisticated applications of an Encoder/Decoder
model can be found in research on the influence of linguistic form on social
inference, particularly with regard to the attribution of causality. In a
sentence of the form "A verbed B," in which A and B are people, and verb
denotes an interpersonal action or state, the cause of the action logically
could be either the grammatical subject (A) or the grammatical object (B) .
If A praises B, the reason might be that A is an enthusiastic and supportive
person or that B had done something especially praiseworthy; A might
dislike B because A is a misanthrope, or because B behaves in an obnoxious
fashion.
Although interpersonal verbs are neutral with respect to explicit
cause, it's been known for some time that they differ considerably in the
extent to which causal agency tends to be attributed to their subjects or
objects (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977; Garvey & Caramazza,
1974). Roger Brown and his associates (Brown, 1986; Brown & Fish, 1983;
Brown & Van Kleeck, 1989; Van Kleeck, Hilger, & Brown, 1988) has
distinguished between verbs denoting interpersonal actions and verbs
denoting interpersonal experiences. For interpersonal action (IA) verbs (e.g.,
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defend, cheat, call), the person who performs the action is the grammatical
subject and the recipient of the action is the grammatical object. Brown et
al. further distinguished between two types of verbs denoting interpersonal
experiences: stimulus-experiencer (S-E) verbs (e.g., amuse, disgust), in which
the stimulus is the grammatical subject and the person having the
experience is the grammatical object; and experiencer-stimulus (E-S) verbs
(e.g., ignore, admire), in which the stimulus is the grammatical object and the
person having the experience is the grammatical subject. 11 For IA verbs,
the performer of the action tends to be seen as its cause. Subjects reading
the sentence "A cheats B" are likely to regard A as responsible for the
cheating . But for interpersonal verbs denoting experiences, the stimulus
person rather than the experiencer is seen as the causal agent. Since for S-E
verbs the stimulus is the grammatical subject, in the sentence "A disgusts B"
A is perceived as causal. However, for E-S verb the grammatical object is
the stimulus; hence, in the sentence "A admires B," B tends to be seen as the
cause.
Implicit causality appears to be a reasonably reliable phenomenon,
but there is little agreement about the factors responsible for it. Among the
several possibilities that researchers have considered are: morphological
differences in the kinds of adjectives that can be derived from different
interpersonal verbs (Brown & Fish, 1983; Hoffman & Tchir, 1990; Van
Kleeck, et al., 1988), schema activation (Brown & Fish, 1983), differential
salience (Kasof & Lee, 1993), variations in the implicit context (Semin &
Fiedler, 1989; 1991; 1992), the perceived volitional control of A and B
(Gilovich & Regan, 1986), and the accessibility of the subject or object in the
comprehender's discourse model (McKoon, Greene, & Ratcliff, 1993).
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Implicit causality also varies in interesting ways with other social
variables. For example, an IA verb's valence affects who will be perceived
as its cause (Franco & Arcuri, 1990; LaFrance & Hahn, 1991); generally
speaking, the actor is more likely to be seen as the cause of negative actions
(e.g., scold, slap). than of positive actions (e.g., praise, kiss). The gender of A
and B also affects who will be seen as the causal agent. LaFrance and Hahn
(1991), using a technique developed by Semin and Fiedler (1991), gave
subjects sentences like "A insulted B" and asked them to provide the
sentence that preceded it (e.g., "B contradicted A," "A disliked B," etc.).
The variable of interest was whether A or B was seen as the cause in the
preceding sentence, which forms the implicit context for understanding the
target sentence. LaFrance and Hahn systematically varied the gender of
the names in the A and B slots. When A was a male, B's gender did not
affect perceived causality. However, a female A was much more likely to
be perceived as the cause when B was a female than when B was a male,
suggesting that females tend not to be seen as causal agents of actions
affecting males.
Among the most interesting and productive applications of implicit
causality has been to the area of group stereotypes. Using Semin and
Fiedler's linguistic category model (Semin & Fiedler, 1989; 1991; 1992),
Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin (1989) have shown an important
asymmetry in the implicational value of the words group members use to
describe the behavior of in-group and out-group members. As one moves
from DAVs to IAVs to SVs in the Semin and Fiedler category system, one
moves from depictions of specific behavioral episodes to depictions of
abstract states or predispositions. Any particular behavioral episode can be
characterized in a variety of ways at different levels of abstraction: "A
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punches B," or "A hurts B," or "A dislikes B." The most abstract way to
characterize a behavior would be as evidence of a predisposition: "A is
aggressive." Maass et al. found that negatively valent behaviors of outgroup members tend to be characterized at relatively high levels of
abstraction, and those of in-group members are characterized more
concretely, but for positively valent behaviors the pattern is reversed.
Positively valent behaviors of out-group members are characterized as
specific episodes, while those of in-group members are characterized
abstractly. Maass et al. call this the "linguistic intergroup bias" (see also
Hamilton, Gibbons, Stroessner, & Sherman, 1992; Maass & Arcuri, 1992).
One consequence of the linguistic intergroup bias is to help make
stereotypes resistant to disconfirmation, since behaviors that are congruent
with the negative out-group stereotype will tend to be characterized as
general properties ("Smith is lazy"), while behaviors that are inconsistent
with the stereotype will tend to be characterized in quite specific terms
("Smith painted his house").
Although examining the causal implications of language has yielded
fascinating results, there are reasons to be cautious about generalizing
these findings to language use. Edwards and Potter (1993) have pointed
out that simple, out of context subject-verb-object sentences of the kind
typically used in studies of implicit causality are rarely encountered in
discourse. Consequently, the judgments subjects make from them may
have little to do with the way language normally is processed in
communication. Seen in isolation, "Alan desires Jane" may be understood as
consequence of Jane's desirability, but in the context of a narrative that
depicts Alan as a compulsive womanizer, his desire for Jane may be
attributed less as to her desirability than it is to his proclivity.
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Is implicit causality really a matter of encoding and decoding? Or, to
put it another way, is an interpersonal verb's causal implications part of its
linguistic meaning, or is it an inference an addressee will draw in a
particular context of usage about what the speaker intended? Semin and
Marsman (in press) argue that interpersonal verbs invite inferences about a
variety of properties (e.g., the perceived temporal duration of the action or
state, how enduring a quality they imply, affective consistency, etc.), causal
agency being only one of them. Researchers have assumed that
interpersonal verbs automatically trigger inferences about causal agency,
but Semin and Marsman suggest that such inferences are themselves a
consequence of contextual factors (e.g., the question the subject is asked).
Much of the work on implicit causality has approached the phenomenon in
linguistic terms, but it may be more readily understood as part of the
addressee's attempt to infer an intended meaning. The general question of
how addressee's extract intended meanings from messages is discussed in
Section 3.
2.3 Issues and Limitations
Two features of the Encoder/Decoder model should be highlighted.
One is implicit in the very notion of a code, and is illustrated in the early
color codability studies. It is that the meaning of a message is fully
specified by its elements—i.e., that meaning is encoded, and that decoding
the message is equivalent to specifying its meaning. The other feature is
that communication consists of two autonomous processes—encoding and
decoding. We have tried to illustrate the Encoder/Decoder schematically
in Figure 1. Despite the fact that language can in certain respects be
regarded as a code, and the fact that both encoding and encoding processes
are involved in communication, encoding and decoding do not adequately
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describe what occurs in communication, as will be discussed in the next
three sections. Here we will just briefly point to some areas where the
approach falls short.
In the first place, it is often the case that the same message can
(correctly) be understood to mean different things in different
circumstances. For example, some messages are understood to mean
something other than their literal meaning. While there is not universal
agreement on the value of the literal vs. nonliteral distinction (Dascal, 1989;
Gibbs, 1982, 1984; Katz, 1981; Keysar, 1989; Searle, 1978), it is abundantly
clear that the most commonplace utterance (e.g., "You're leaving") can be
understood differently in different contexts (e.g., as an observation of a
state of affairs, as a prediction of a future state of affairs, etc.). Without
making the relevant context part of the code, a model that conceptualizes
communication as simply encoding and decoding will have difficulty
explaining how the same message can be understood to mean different
things at different times. Moreover, even when context is held constant,
the same message can mean different things to different addressees. And
there is considerable evidence to indicate that speakers design messages
with their eventual destinations in mind (Bell, 1980; Clark & Murphy, 1982;
Fussell & Krauss, 1989a; Graumann, 1989; Krauss & Fussell, 1991).
Similarly, there is growing evidence that nonverbal behaviors are not
simply signs that encode internal state in a straightforward way. A facial
expression may be related to a person's internal state, but comprehending
its significance can require considerably more than simply identifying the
expression as a smile, a frown, an expression of disgust, etc. For example,
smiles are understood to encode a affectively positive internal state, but
they hardly do this in a reflexive fashion. In a series of ingenious field
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experiments, Kraut (1979) found smiling to be far more dependent on
whether or not the individual was interacting with another person than it
was on the affective quality of the precipitating event, and Fridlund (1991)
has shown that even for people who were alone, the belief that another
person was engaged in the same task (albeit in another room) was
sufficient to potentiate smiling. In dyadic conversations, the facial
expressions of the listener (i.e., the person not holding the conversational
floor at a given moment) may change rapidly. Some of these changes (e.g.,
smiles) may represent back-channel signals (Brunner, 1979; Chen, 1990),
while others (e.g., wincing at the other's pain) may serve to signal the
listener's concern (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, Lemery, & Mullet, 1988; Bavelas,
Black, Lemery, & Mullet, 1986).
Even aspects of voice quality cannot be straightforwardly interpreted.
For example, a speaker's vocal pitch range is a consequence of the
architecture of the vocal tract. However, social factors can influence how a
given speaker places his or her voice within that range. Men seem to place
their voices in the lower part of their vocal range, and women do not,
which, incidentally helps explain why a man's size can more accurately be
predicted from his voice than a woman's (Gradol & Swann, 1983). In
addition, a speaker's pitch and amplitude will be influenced by the pitch
and amplitude of the conversational partner (Gregory, 1986, 1990;
Lieberman, 1967; Natale, 1975). In a similar fashion, a speaker's internal
state can induce changes in voice quality, but the relationship is hardly
one-to-one. For example, stress profoundly affects voice fundamental
frequency, but in any specific instance the effect can vary considerably
depending on the conversational partner (Streeter et al., 1983). So, while
encoding and decoding may characterize the role of nonverbal behavior is
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some communication situations, the applicability of the model is far from
universal.
3. INTENTIONALIST MODELS
3.1 Introduction
For encoding/decoding models, meaning is a property of messages.
An alternative view is that successful communication entails the exchange
of communicative intentions,12 and that messages are simply the vehicle by
which such exchanges are accomplished. We will refer to models
organized around this assumption as Intentionalist models. From this point
of view, intentions are not mapped onto word strings in a one-to-one
fashion; rather, from among a variety of potential alternative formulations,
speakers select the one that expresses a particular intention most
felicitously. Decoding the literal meaning of a message by the hearer is
only a step in the process of comprehension. A further process of inference
is required to derive the communicative intention that underlies it. For
Intentionalist models, the social construction of meaning is made possible
by the inferential rules speakers employ to formulate utterances that
convey their communicative intentions, and listeners use to identify those
intentions. To the extent that the speaker's intentions are understood
correctly, meaning is socially shared.
Intentionalist models derive from two sets of ideas that had their
origins in ordinary language philosophy: Grice's cooperative principle and
Searle's theory of speech acts. In this section we briefly review the central
points of these two theoretical stances, and then discussion the notion of
context in Intentionalist models.
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3.1.1 Intentionality in Discourse
Earlier (Section 1.2) we distinguished between symbols and signs as
constituents of messages. One of the features that distinguishes symbols
from signs is that the former are used intentionally. Grice (1957; 1969) has
argued that such intentionality is intrinsic to understanding messages
function communicatively. According to Grice, a message can be
considered intentional if and only if (a) the speaker intended the message
to create an effect (i.e., a belief) in the listener; and (b) the speaker intended
that effect to result from the listeners' recognition of that intention.
Central to the Intentionalist position is the idea that words and their
intended effects on the listener do not bear a fixed relationship. A phrase
like "I love social psychology," used sincerely, will be understood to mean
one thing, and the same words, used ironically, will be understood to mean
something quite different. The assumption about the relation of words and
meanings is reflected in the distinction between sentence-meaning (i.e., the
literal meaning of a word or phrase) and speaker-meaning (i.e., the meaning
the communicator intends to convey by using that sentence meaning).
Although the sentence-meanings of the sincere and ironic utterances in the
example were identical, their speaker-meanings are not. Most pragmatic
models of communication, including Grice's, assume that speaker meaning
is identified by way of sentence meaning. That is, although the two types of
meanings are distinct, sentence meaning forms the basis for determining
speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is evaluated in light of the context of
conversation, and used to draw inferences about the intended meaning.
Grice's Conversational Maxims
If speaker meaning is not identical to sentence meaning, how do
speakers go about formulating utterances that will be understood correctly,
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and how do addressees identify an utterance's intended meaning? Grice
(1975) proposed that we view conversation as a cooperative endeavor.
Even when their purpose is to dispute, criticize, or insult, communicators
must shape their messages to be meaningful to their addressees. To do so,
Grice proposed, they follow a general Cooperative Principle, comprised of
four basic rules, which he termed Conversational Maxims (see Table 1):
messages should be consistent with the maxims of quality (be truthful),
quantity (contain neither more nor less information than is required); (c)
relation (be relevant to the ongoing discussion);13 and (d) manner (be brief,
unambiguous, etc.).
----------------------------------------------------------Insert Table 1 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------Of course, many utterances appear to violate one or more of the
maxims. Consider irony. The person who says "I love social psychology,"
meaning "I hate social psychology," appears to have violated the maxim of
quality. Likewise, extreme overpoliteness (e.g., "If it wouldn't be a great
inconvenience, would you mind terribly much if I asked you to get off my
toe?") is an apparent violation of the maxim of quantity. Perhaps even
more common are ostensible violations of relevance, as in this questionresponse sequence adapted from Levinson (1983, p. 102), in which the
response bears no obvious relationship to the question:
A: Do you know where Bill is?
B: There's a red Honda Accord outside Jane's house
Grice argued that even in the face of such apparent violations,
communicators typically assume that the cooperative principle holds, and
seek to interpret the message in a way that resolves the apparent
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violation.14 For example, A may reason that B knows (or believes) that Bill
has a red Honda, and, hence, that the intended meaning of the utterance is
that Bill is at Jane's house. By drawing upon Grice's conversational
maxims, A can infer B's communicative intention.
3.1.2 Speech Act Theory
A second line of thought that has influenced Intentionalist models of
communication stems from work in the philosophy of language on speech
act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969, 1979). As was noted earlier, a
communicative act can be thought of as a behavior intended to accomplish
some particular end. In his felicitously titled book, How to do Things with
Words, Austin (1962) observed that many utterances can be described as
acts on a speaker's part: questions, promises, demands, etc. Indeed, any
utterance can be viewed as made up of three rather different types of acts:
a locutionary act (the act of uttering a specific sentence with a specific
conventional meaning), an illocutionary act (the act of demanding,
promising, etc. through the use of a specific locution), and a perlocutionary
act (an attempt to achieve some sort of verbal or behavioral response from
the addressee).15 By saying, "Please hand me the corkscrew," a speaker is
producing a particular sentence (a locutionary act), making a request (an
illocutionary act), and trying to induce the address to pass the corkscrew (a
perlocutionary act). Although all three types of acts are of interest in
interpersonal communication, theoretical development and experimental
research has tended to focus on illocutionary acts.
Direct and indirect speech acts
Each sentence form has an associated literal force, or conventional
illocutionary meaning, but the intended meaning of an utterance may
differ from its literal force. Consider, for instance, the various ways of
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requesting that a door be shut listed in Table 2. Each can serve as a request
to shut the door, despite the fact that except for "close the door" their
sentence forms are not requests, but assertions and questions. This
apparent anomaly has been resolved in speech act theory by positing a
distinction between the literal force of a sentence type and its indirect force.
Thus, while the utterance "Did you forget the door?" carries the literal force
of a question, in the appropriate circumstances it can have the indirect force
of a request. In Searle's terms, it is an indirect speech act. According to
Searle (1975), to understand indirect speech acts, listeners draw upon their
knowledge of speech acts, Gricean principles of cooperative conversation,
and the context of the conversation.
----------------------------------------------------------Insert Table 2 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------3.1.3 The Role of Context in Intentionalist Models
Although the notion of context plays a central role in both Grice's and
Searle's pragmatic analyses of meaning, as Levinson (1983) has observed it
has proven problematic to define in a principled way. Lyons (1977)
includes as part of the context (a) communicators' roles in the conversation
(speaker, addressee), their social roles (e.g., doctor, patient), and their social
status; (b) the time and place of the interaction; (c) the formality of the
situation, (d) the appropriate style of speech (e.g., literary, casual); (e) the
conversational topic; and (f) the situational domain (e.g., home, work).
Certainly not all of the circumstances that surround a particular act of
speaking will enter into its interpretation, but distinguishing between the
elements that do and those that do not is far from straightforward.
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Most Intentionalist models assume that it is communicators' beliefs
about each of these factors, rather than the actual state of affairs, that
guides their use of language. Both Grice and Searle incorporate into their
theories the notion that the relevant context for interpreting utterances is
the interlocutors' common ground or mutual knowledge -- the knowledge,
beliefs etc. shared by the speaker and hearer, and known to be shared by
them (Clark & Marshall, 1981; Lewis, 1969; Schiffer, 1972). Mutual
knowledge is discussed in Section 4.1.
3.2 Research Findings
Intentionalist models are in principle models of production and
interpretation. Indeed, as Hilton (in press) observes, Grice's Maxims were
framed as imperatives for the speaker: be brief, orderly, relevant, and
truthful. In practice, however, most research from this perspective has
focused on comprehension, and virtually no experimental work has
studied how speakers draw upon their knowledge of the cooperative
principle and speech acts when they formulate messages.
We will examine three bodies of research that reflect an Intentionalist
perspective: (a) psycholinguistic research on the comprehension of indirect
speech acts; (b) research on the role of social psychological variables such
as politeness strategies, interpersonal relationships, and self-serving biases
in intentionalist models of language production and comprehension; and
(c) studies of how the cooperative principle and its maxims affect subjects'
interpretations of materials and responses in experiments and surveys.
3.2.1 Comprehending Indirect Speech Acts
Psycholinguistic models of speech act theory have assumed that the
comprehension of indirect illocutionary meaning requires three stages of
cognitive processing (hence the term "three-stage models"). First, literal
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sentence meaning is determined; then, the appropriateness of this literal
meaning is assessed in light of conversational principles and the context;
finally, the intended meaning is identified on the basis of the literal
meaning and conversational principles. It should follow from this model
that: (a) it takes longer to process indirect speech acts than direct ones; (b)
both the direct and indirect force of utterances play a role in
comprehension, and (c) to the extent that the social and linguistic context
helps reduce the set of potential indirect meanings, comprehension of
indirect speech acts is facilitated . Empirical support for these predictions
has been mixed.
Stages in comprehension.
The three-stage model has been tested on several types of indirect
speech acts, including indirect requests and figurative language. Clark and
Lucy (1975) found some support for the three stage model with respect to
indirect requests, but their results have not been replicated consistently,
and other investigators have reported contradictory findings (see Gibbs,
1982; 1984; 1994a, 1994b, for reviews). Gibbs (1983) found that some
indirect request forms were idiomatic, and required no more processing
time than comparable literal statements (see also Holtgraves, 1994).
The adequacy of three-stage models for explaining figurative
language comprehension also has been called into question. A substantial
body of research has been accumulated on this topic, and we will only
consider a few of the findings that are pertinent to evaluating stage models
(see Cacciari & Glucksberg, 1994 and Gibbs, 1994a, 1994b for reviews of
this literature). Reaction-time studies do not find uniformly that
metaphors take longer to process than comparable literal statements (see
Gibbs, 1994b; Cacciari & Glucksberg, 1994). Furthermore, hearers have
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difficulty preventing themselves from processing the figurative meaning of
metaphorical expressions, even when the literal meanings are the ones that
are relevant to the task (Glucksberg, Gildea, & Bookin, 1982). Finally, some
types of figurative language (e.g., such familiar idioms as "kick the bucket")
may never be processed literally, but instead seem to be listed in the mental
lexicon as single lexical entries. In short, the evidence to date has not
supported the three-stage theory over other models. It is, of course,
possible that literal sentence meaning plays a role in comprehension of
nonliteral language, quite apart from its temporal priority.
The role of direct and indirect meanings.
A second, less direct, prediction of three-stage models concerns
interpretations of indirect meaning. If a hearer calculates the indirect
meaning of a speech act, this indirect meaning should be reflected in the
response to the message. To examine this hypothesis, Clark (1979) had a
confederate call restaurants and ask either "Do you accept American
Express cards?" or "Do you accept credit cards?" He reasoned that
although the first question is interpretable as a direct question, the second
carries an additional illocutionary force -- a request for information as to
what cards are accepted. In line with his predictions, all respondents in the
first condition simply said "yes," while more than half of those in the
second condition added further information about the particular credit
cards that were acceptable. Clark further argued that as the relevance of
the literal meaning of an utterance declines, so does the likelihood that the
addressee will incorporate it in the response to the indirect speech act.
Consistent with this hypothesis, he found that when bank clerks were
asked "Can you tell me what the interest rate is?" only 16% said "yes"
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before providing the rate; restaurateurs as "Do you accept credit cards?" all
answered "yes" before they added the names of the cards they accepted..
The role of context in identifying indirect meaning
In the studies described above, the relationship between direct and
indirect meaning typically was based on convention, and listeners may
have been able to identify the speaker's intended meaning with little
contextual support. Other research in the Intentionalist perspective has
focused upon such forms of indirect speech as demonstrative reference,
that are difficult if not impossible to comprehend outside of the
conversational context. For example, one might point to an income tax
return (demonstratum) and say, "I hate those people." The addressee's task
is to infer the relationship between the demonstratum and the intended
referent using the speaker's utterance as a guide (Clark, Schreuder, &
Buttrick, 1983; Nunberg, 1979).
Clark et al. (1983) examined the claim that demonstrative references,
like indirect speech acts, are understood by evaluating the literal meaning
of the expression in conjunction with the context of communication -specifically, the speaker and addressee's mutual knowledge -- in a series of
studies. In one, subjects were shown color photos of four types of flowers,
and asked "How would you describe the color of this flower?" In one
condition, daffodils were clearly more prominent than the other flowers,
whereas in the other condition they were only slightly more prominent.
When the salience of the daffodils was low (and hence the referent of
"flowers" could not easily be identified), subjects tended to ask, "which
one?" However, when the salience of the daffodils was high, more than
half responded with respect to the daffodils without asking for further
clarification. According to Clark et al., the daffodils' high salience allowed
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addressees to infer that it was part of common ground, and that speakers
intended them to use this salience in identifying the referent of "the
flower." In contrast, when salience was low, the referent of "the flower"
was obscure.
In another study, Clark et al. (1983) showed subjects a picture of thenPresident Ronald Reagan with David Stockman (then director of the Office
Management and Budget), and asked one of two questions: "You know
who this man is, don't you?" or "Do you have any idea at all who this man
is?" The two questions were designed to induce different perceptions of
the speaker's assumptions about the addressee. In the first case, the
question presumes that the identity of "this man" is known by the
addressee, while the second presumes that "this man" is not known. In
addition, addressees assume that the speaker intends for them to use these
presumptions in determining what is meant. The results were consistent
with this line of reasoning: with the first question, 80% selected Ronald
Reagan as the referent, while with the second question, none did.
Another kind of indirect meaning is found in speakers' use of existing
words to create novel ones. Some common examples are denominal verbs
(e.g., "tunnel the mountain, "wait-list the passenger," Clark & Clark, 1979),
eponymous expressions (e.g., "do a Nixon to the tapes," Clark & Gerrig,
1983), and novel compounds (e.g., "apple juice chair," Downing, 1977).
Such novel words and expressions cannot have literal meanings, and their
use constitutes an apparent violation of the cooperative principle.
However, listeners usually are able to discern the speaker's intentions
without difficulty (e.g., Clark & Gerrig, 1983).
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Summary and conclusions
The research we have reviewed indicates that people take the
intended meaning of utterances into account, and that they determine this
indirect meaning by using the surface form of the message, the context, and
the mutual knowledge shared between speaker and hearer. In these
studies such social psychological dimensions as the relationship between
speaker and listener have been given little consideration. The extent to
which these and other social psychological factors play a role in the
identification of speakers' intentions is examined in the next section.
3.2.2 Social Psychological Factors in Intentionalist Models
Social psychologists have long been aware of the impact of social
factors on language comprehension. Nearly 50 years ago, Solomon Asch
(1946) demonstrated that the same message, attributed to different sources
(Vladimir Lenin or Thomas Jefferson), would be interpreted quite
differently. Although little research from the Intentionalist perspective has
pursued the implications of Asch's insight, several investigators have
examined how such social factors as the communicators' relative statuses
influence the identification of speakers' intentions. This section reviews
research on the effects of several social factors on the interpretation of
indirect speech acts, and how the type of speech act affects perceptions of
the relationship of the communicators.
Politeness
Because complying with requests for help or information can impose
a cost on others, making requests may require subtle social negotiation.
Politeness forms play a role in this process. As illustrated in Table 2, there
are a number of alternative forms a speaker can choose from in making a
request. Brown and Levinson's (1987; see also R. Lakoff, 1973, 1977)
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contend that these alternatives differ in the extent to which they threaten
the "face" of the recipient, in their potential to make the addressee feel bad
about him- or herself, the task, the speaker and/or their relationship. They
achieve this effect by varying the degree to which the sentence form of the
utterance imposes upon, and offers alternatives to, the addressee. A direct
request such as "Shut the door" leaves the addressee with no options
whereas "Would you mind closing the door?" at least preserves the illusion
that the addressee might say refuse.
There is abundant evidence that the literal sentence form of an
indirect request can affect its perceived politeness. Indirect requests that
make it easy for the addressee to decline are judged to be more polite (e.g.,
Clark and Schunk, 1980; Francik & Clark, 1985; Gibbs, 1986; Holtgraves &
Yang, 1990).16 However, this general rule is dependent on other factors,
among them the size of the request (i.e., the burden complying imposes on
the requestee). According to Brown and Levinson, when making small
requests or requesting things that the requester is entitled to request, the
use of excessively polite forms may be seen as sarcastic (e.g., "I wonder if I
might interrupt your reverie, Nurse Grimble, to ask you to hand me a
hemostat so I can complete the surgery before the patient expires?").
Consistent with this analysis, Holtgraves and Yang (1990, Experiment 1)
found that subjects judged direct requests more likely to be used for small
requests than for large ones.
Relative status and social distance
In addition to the size of a request, several dimensions of the social
relationship between speaker and addressee can also influence perceived
politeness. As Slugoski and Turnbull (1988) point out, the indirect request
"I hate to bother you, but would you mind very much passing me the salt"
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might be seen as polite when addressed to a stranger at a formal dinner
gathering, but sarcastic when said to a member of one's immediate family.
Brown and Levinson's model includes two social factors (in addition to
request size) as additive determinants of indirectness: the relative power of
the hearer over the speaker, and the social distance between them.
According to what might be called the Brown-Levinson Law:
Indirectness = Request Size + Power (of hearer over speaker) + Social
Distance
The law predicts that as any of these factors increases, requests will become
increasingly indirect and thus less face-threatening.
Several investigators have attempted to test the law formula
empirically. Holtgraves and Yang (1990, Experiment 2) used a set of
vignettes to manipulate the communicators' social distance, the power of
the addressee relative to the speaker, and the politeness of the request.
When participants were of equal power, direct (hence face-threatening)
request forms were judged both more likely and more polite when the
interactants had a close, as opposed to distant, relationship. Relative
power influenced perceptions of politeness, but only when the relationship
was distant. On the whole, Holtgraves and Yang's results support the view
that social relationship factors can influence perceptions of speech acts,
although they also suggest that Brown and Levinson's additive model may
need refinement.
The preservation of face is a factor in a number of other speech acts,
including negative assertions. It sometimes is necessary to provide an
addressee with negative feedback or evaluations, and in such situations
speakers may be concerned that their response will threaten their
addressee's face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). A professor, asked by a failing
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student how well he or she has done on the final exam, might opt to
respond indirectly (e.g., "You must have been very busy with your other
courses this semester"). As with indirect requests, social relationship
factors can influence how negative information is presented. Relative
status, in particular, may affect the decision to speak indirectly rather than
directly, as well as the form the indirect speech act takes, in part because
social norms specify that lower-status individuals be more concerned with
saving the face of higher-status individuals than vice versa (Holtgraves,
1986).
To examine these issues, Holtgraves (1986, Experiment 1) provided
subjects with a series of vignettes in which a high or a low status
participant initiated a conversation about something that had turned out
poorly. The vignettes manipulated several factors, including (a) who was
responsible for the negative outcome (the high status individual, the lower
status individual, or a third party who was not present), and (b) the type of
response elicited by a question about the item or event's success (e.g., direct
negative response, indirect response, or a switch of topic). Holtgraves
found that when the addressee's face was threatened, evasive responses
were judged more polite, and more likely to be made in everyday
conversation, than direct responses. In contrast, when the addressee's face
was not at risk (i.e., when the third party was responsible for the failure),
direct responses were judged to be equally polite and more likely than
indirect responses. The effects of the status manipulation, while in accord
with predictions, were not statistically significant.
Communicators' affective relationships
The Brown-Levinson model is primarily concerned with the way
speakers' utterances are designed to maintain the face of their
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coparticipants. But as Slugoski and Turnbull (1988) point out, it is
sometimes the case that a speaker intends an utterance to be insulting,
critical or scornful The focus on face-saving rather than face-threatening
behavior, they suggest, is due to Brown and Levinson's emphasis on
interpersonal relationships that are either affectively positive or neutral. To
the degree that people like each other, we might expect them be more
concerned with face-saving and, hence, more polite. However, interactants
who dislike each another are likely to have little concern with others' face
maintenance, and indeed may intentionally threaten it.
Slugoski and Turnbull examined the role of liking and social distance
on the perception of speakers' intentions using vignettes in which these
two factors were varied orthogonally. Each vignette ended with a remark
that was literally either a compliment or an insult. Subjects first indicated
what they thought the speaker meant by the utterance, and then rated how
insulting or complimentary the remark was, how well the two participants
knew each other, and how much they liked each other. Interestingly, social
distance did not affect the interpretation of insults; however, the affective
tone of the relationship strongly influenced the literalness of the
interpretation: Literal insults were more likely to be taken nonliterally
when the addressee was liked, while literal compliments were judged more
likely to be intended nonliterally when the addressee was disliked.
Slugoski and Turnbull propose that the affective relationship of speaker
and hearer be added to the Brown-Levinson model; however, as they note,
it is not clear that affect has a linear relationship to indirectness. For
instance, some of the most face-threatening remarks are made within the
context of family arguments. Furthermore, as Goffman (1967) observed,
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people generally try to avoid threatening others' face regardless of their
liking for one another.
Inferring relationships from speech acts
Slugoski and Turnbull (1988) have pointed to an interesting property
of the Brown and Levinson's model. Because the relationship of the
variable is additive, addressees (and others) who know the value of any
three variables in the equation can assess the level of the fourth. For
example, given an utterance of a given level of politeness, and knowledge
of the request size and social distance between communicators, the
speaker's assumptions about his or her status vis-à-vis the addressee can be
calculated. If one professor tells another "Take my place at today's
meeting," the request not only seems impolite, but also indicates that the
speaker feels superior in status and power to the addressee. In contrast, the
same request phrased as "Would you mind terribly much taking my place
at today's meeting?" implies that the addressee is of equal or greater status.
Several studies have addressed the impact of message form on perceptions
of such social relationship factors as relative status, liking, and social
distance.
Using a series of vignettes that manipulated the threat to face posed
by the interaction, Holtgraves (1986, Experiment 2) examined how
response type (direct, indirect, irrelevant) affected perceptions of the
respondent's status, the questioner's and respondents' liking of one
another, and the closeness of the relationship. Perceived status, social
distance, and liking were influenced by the type of speech act used to
respond. For example, in face-threatening scenarios, direct responses led to
inferences of higher relative status for the respondent, and to perceptions
of greater liking and closeness in the relationship than did indirect replies.
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In a related study, Holtgraves and Yang (1990, Experiment 3) found for
both American and Korean subjects that the perceived status of the speaker
relative to the addressee increase as the politeness of request form declined.
In their study of the effects of a relationship's affective tone and social
distance on speech act comprehension, Slugoski and Turnbull (1988) also
examined inferences about social relationships. They found that the literal
meaning of compliments and insults did not affect perceptions of social
distance, although a small but significant positive relationship was found
between literal compliments and perceived liking. Because of some
technical problems in the study's design, these findings must be regarded
as tentative, research is needed to address these issues in a more rigorous
way.
Summary and conclusions
It is clear that social dimensions of the conversational context can
influence the interpretation of speech acts, including requests, negative
assertions, and compliments. However, the available evidence suggests
that the Brown and Levinson model needs revision. A general problem
may be that models have been formulated too broadly. Holtgraves (1994)
results indicate that the relationship between speaker status and the
interpretation of indirect requests is mediated by a number of variables,
perhaps chief among them the conventionality of the request form used.
Methodological considerations further complicate interpretation of
the results of many of these studies. For example, researchers appear not to
have considered the implications of their research on inferred relationships
for message comprehension. In the next section, we turn to studies that
directly address the effects of conversational rules on subjects'
understanding of experimental materials.
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3.2.3 Inferring Intentions in Research
An extensive program of research by Denis Hilton, Norbert Schwarz,
Fritz Strack, and their colleagues has examined the role of inferred
intentions in experimental and survey research. 17 The fundamental
premise underlying this work is that interactions between experimenter
and subject, or survey researcher and respondent, can be conceived as
conversations, albeit often one-sided ones, to which Grice's maxims apply.
A failure on the part of investigators to appreciate the conversational
nature of their studies can result in serious misinterpretations of their
subjects' responses.
Such tasks as understanding experimental instructions or
determining what a survey question means require language
comprehension, and, as is the case in conversational contexts,
comprehension entails inferring the experimenter's communicative
intentions. Problems arise when experimenters violate conversational
maxims, and clarifying information is rarely provided. As Schwarz et al.
(1991, p. 69) observe,
Experimenters as social communicators often introduce information
that is neither informative nor relevant. However, subjects have no
reason to doubt the relevance of information provided to them in a
serious research setting and are likely to assume that the utterance
reflects a particular "communicative intention"…on the part of the
experimenter.
Research has addressed how violations of Grice's Maxims of quality,
quantity, relation, and manner can result in what have been viewed as
judgment errors in a variety of domains. Other studies examine how
features of questionnaires influence interpretations of specific questions.
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Pragmatic effects on judgment errors
A number of studies have examined how principles of conversation
may play a role in what are traditionally considered to be errors in
reasoning on the part of experimental subjects. Here we will focus on how
Intentionalist models have been applied to three reasoning and judgment
phenomena: the base-rate fallacy, the conjunction error, and the
fundamental attribution error.
The base-rate fallacy. In their classic demonstration of the misuse of
base-rate information, Kahneman and Tversky (1973) gave subjects
personality profiles they described as sampled from a population
containing either 30% engineers and 70% lawyers or 70% engineers and
30% lawyers, and asked them to estimate the likelihood that the person was
an engineer. Subjects based their judgments on individuating personality
information in the profile, without taking into account the a priori
probability that a randomly sampled individual was an engineer or a
lawyer. Kahneman and Tversky interpreted their findings in terms of the
representativeness heuristic: subjects based their judgments on how closely
the described individual matched their perceptions of the personalities of
engineers and lawyers.
Schwarz and his colleagues (Schwarz et al., 1991b) point out that the
wording of the instructions may have led subjects to infer that the
experimenter, by focusing on the fact that the information used in the
descriptions was gathered by psychologists, based on interviews and
personality tests, intended them to use the personality information in
making their judgments . They found Schwarz et al., 1991b, Experiment 1)
that when the perceived relevance of the personality information was
reduced (by stating that the sketches had been produced by a computer)
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the bias effect was greatly reduced. Similarly, Ginossar and Trope (1987)
manipulated the credibility of the source of the personality information
(trained psychologist, beginning interviewer, palm reader), and found that
deviation from the base-rate increased with source credibility. Although
Ginossar and Trope did not interpret their results in conversational terms,
Hilton (in press) argues that subjects considered the credibility of the
source in assessing the extent to which the maxim of quality was upheld,
and discounted personality descriptions from less credible sources.
Ordering conventions in language also can affect use of base-rate
information. Clark and Haviland (Clark & Haviland, 1977; Haviland &
Clark, 1974) have proposed that communicators construct their messages
so that information that is already known is provided prior to new
information. This idea, termed the given-new contract, suggests that when
two items of information are presented in a message, the first item is
regarded as part of what is "given" for the interpretation of the second. The
maxims of quantity, quality, and relation suggest that this "new"
information must be important to the overall message; otherwise it should
not be presented at all. Krosnick, Li, & Lehman (1990) contend that these
conversational rules serve to heighten the perceived importance of the
second piece of information. To examine this possibility, they carried out a
series of studies in which order of base rate and individuating information
was manipulated. Consistent with their analysis, they found that when the
base-rate information was presented after the individuating information,
subjects weighted this information more heavily in their judgments.
The conjunction fallacy. Another well-known cognitive bias, the
conjunction fallacy (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983), has also been reexamined
in Gricean terms. The conjunction fallacy involves a violation of the logical
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rule that if B is a proper subset of A, the number of elements in B cannot be
greater than the number in A. In Tversky and Kahneman's study, subjects
read brief biographical sketches of target individuals, and then assessed the
likelihood of statements about the targets. The set of statements always
contained one category membership option (e.g., "Linda is a bank teller")
and one category subset option (e.g., "Linda is a bank teller and is active in
the feminist movement") which provided a better match to the personality
description. Overwhelmingly, subjects rated the latter proposition as more
likely than the former, disregarding the logical principle that the likelihood
of being in a subset can be no greater than the likelihood of being in the
superordinate category.
Tversky and Kahneman attributed their subjects' judgments to their
use of the representativeness heuristic, but several investigators from an
Intentionalist perspective (e.g., Hilton, in press; Schwarz, 1994) have noted
that pragmatic constraints may have influenced the findings, and that
people's reasoning abilities may not be as poor as the results suggest (see
also Dulany & Hilton, 1991; Markus and Zajonc, 1985; Politzer & Noveck,
1991). Since the maxim of quantity requires that speakers provide as much
information as necessary, subjects may have interpreted the first alternative
to mean that Linda was a bank teller but was not active in the feminist
movement. The contextual framing of the task likewise suggests this
interpretation. If subjects interpreted the task in this light, their judgments
would no longer be considered erroneous -- or at least not as erroneous. In
two experiments Dulany and Hilton (1991) examined this possibility and
found that only 55%, and 32% (depending on the experiment) interpreted
"Linda is a bank teller" in the way Tversky and Kahneman intended.
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Curiously, however, the choice of interpretation did not affect the rate of
conjunction errors in these two studies.
The Fundamental Attribution Error. There is also some evidence that
the perceived relevance of experimental materials may play a role in the
fundamental attribution error, particularly in studies using the classic Jones
and Harris paradigm (Jones, 1990; Jones & Harris, 1967). In these studies,
subjects are told that a target person wrote an essay about a particular issue
under either free- or forced-choice conditions, and then are asked to judge
the target's "true" stance on the issue. Wright and Wells (1988)
hypothesized that by giving subjects the essays before they made their
judgments, experimenters implicitly indicated that the essays were relevant
to the judgment task. When the perceived relevance of the essay was
reduced by telling subjects that some of the materials they received might
not be necessary for the task, Wright and Wells found the size of the
fundamental attribution error to be substantially smaller.
Context effects in interpreting experimental materials
Conversational principles also affect subjects' understanding of such
mundane aspects of experiments as instructions, rating forms, and
questionnaires. Effects have been found for both the wording and layout of
questions, and for the measures used to obtain subjects' responses.
Questionnaire design. Many of the questions posed in questionnaires
are subject to more than one interpretation. When faced with ambiguities
of this sort, Strack, Schwarz, and Wankë (1991) argue, subjects look to the
question's context to identify the researcher's intended meaning. One
aspect of the context is the preceding question, and, in the belief that
related questions are asked in a series, subjects may apply the cooperative
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principle to assess the intended meaning of the question. Strack et al.
(1991) investigated these possibilities in a series of studies
In one study, Strack et al. (1991, Experiment 1) asked German
students about their attitudes toward an "educational contribution." For
half of the subjects this question was preceded by one that concerned
payments from students; for the other half, the preceding question concerned
payments to students. Not surprisingly, students in the latter condition
were more favorably inclined toward the ambiguous "educational
contribution," suggesting that they understood the question to concern
payments to students.
Given these clear pragmatic effects, it is relevant to observe that
reports of responses to survey questions virtually never include
information on the context in which that answer was obtained. The
distorting results of such context effects should be especially great in
results that assess changes over time in some index (e.g., Presidential
popularity, confidence in the economy, personal well being). If the context
is different each time the question is asked, there is no straightforward way
to distinguishing context effects from real change in the index.
Although researchers in the Intentionalist tradition have examined
how the context affects the respondent's interpretation of experimental
instructions and questionnaire items, they have given less consideration to
the ways that respondents' expectations of the context in which their
responses will be interpreted could affect the way those responses are
formulated. But consider the following not entirely hypothetical
interchange from a structured interview.
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Interviewer: How would you describe your health over the past two
years? Would you say it was "excellent," "very good," "pretty good,"
"fair" or "poor"?
Respondent: Well, two years ago I had a major heart attack, and last
year I had another less serious attack, so I guess you could say "poor."
I: Okay. And how is your health now? Would you say it was
"excellent," "very good," "pretty good," "fair" or "poor"?
R: Considering all I've been through, I'd say it was "pretty good."
It is clear that the "pretty good" in this example is intended to be
understood as "pretty good in comparison to the way I was;" in terms of
the response scale the interviewer is using, the respondent's present
condition would more accurately be characterized as "fair" or "poor." Such
responses have been recognized as a problem in structured interviews that
have a quasi-conversational format, and it would be surprising if they
weren't also a problem in questionnaires.
Response alternatives. Self reports of the frequency of particular
behaviors depend upon how these behaviors are defined by the
respondent. Since questionnaires are not always clear about an activity's
definition, respondents may use the range of alternative frequencies
provided to determine what the experimenter means by potentially
ambiguous terms (Schwarz & Hippler, 1987; Schwarz, Strack, Muller, &
Chassein, 1988). For example, when asking for quantitative estimates,
survey researchers often provide respondents with graded categories (01/2 hr., 1/2-1 hr., etc.), and include a cut-off point on the scale (more than 4
hrs.). Bless, Bohner, Hild, and Schwarz (1992) asked respondents to
estimate the amount of their leisure time they spent in a variety of
activities, systematically varying the location of the cut-off point. They
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found substantial effects on responding depending on where the cut-off
was located. Effects were particularly marked when the definition of the
activity itself was vague (cultural activities vs. watching television), and
when respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of their leisure
time rather than the number of hours. Interestingly, according to Schwarz
(1994) when the relevance of the scale is reduced (e.g., when subjects are
told that the response alternatives are being pretested) effects of the
response scale are mitigated.
Hilton (1990; in press) suggests that response alternatives may affect
results in causal attribution studies. He notes that in such classic studies as
McArthur's (1972), subjects attribute the observed behavior to single causes
(e.g., actor, circumstances) simply by checking an item, while attributions
to complex causes (e.g., actor+circumstances) must be written in. This may
serve to focus subjects' attention on single causes, leading to the conclusion
that they overlook consensus information that would lead to complex
attributions Consistent with Hilton's analysis, studies that provide all
possible alternatives among the response set (e.g., actor,
actor+circumstances, actor+object, actor+object+circumstances) have found
that subjects provide more interactional attributions than was found in
McArthur's original experiment (e.g., Hilton & Jaspars, 1987; Jaspars, 1983).
Summary and conclusions
In the past decade, considerable evidence has accumulated on the
effects of conversational principles on subjects' interpretations of research
materials. The results underscore the importance of investigators carefully
examining the communicative effects of their stimuli and procedures.
Implicitly, it seems, social psychologists have tended to conceptualize their
interactions with their subjects in terms of a simple Encoder/Decoder
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model, while their subjects often have approached these interactions quite
differently. One result has been that subjects and experimenters have
imposed different interpretations on the conditions of the experiment. In
an older terminology, subject and experimenter have been in different
"psychological situations" (Lewin, 1951). No one would contend that all
instances of the fundamental attribution error or the base-rate fallacy are
artifacts of misunderstood communication, or that survey results are
always contaminated by mistakes in question interpretation. At the same
time, it behooves experimenters and survey researchers to appreciate that,
whatever else they may be doing, they are communicating with their
subjects and respondents, and that in communication it is intentions, not
messages, that are being exchanged. In successful communication, the
intention constructed by the addressee matches the communicative
intention of the speaker.
3.3 Issues and Limitations
Although the Intentionalist approach has yielded considerable
insight, like all of the models we discuss it is limited in its ability to account
for the social nature of communication. In this section we discuss several
issues that remain unresolved in current Intentionalist theories: the role of
social information in the identification of intended meaning, the encoding
of communicative intentions, asymmetries between speaker and hearer,
and the relationship of illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.
3.3.1 Effects of the Speaker on Identifying Communicative Intentions
Models in the Intentionalist tradition tend to focus on general
pragmatic rules that apply across many situations. However, several of the
studies we reviewed suggest that knowledge of the speaker, and
particularly the speaker's relationship to the addressee, affects subjects'
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interpretations of the intended meaning of a message. For example, what
is perceived as a metaphor when uttered by a fluent adult may be viewed
as an error when uttered by a young child. Even in experimental contexts,
knowledge of the source of a message may affect its interpretation. It is
quite likely that manipulating the perceived source of the questionnaire
(e.g., a mental health institute vs. a national polling service) in Strack et al.'s
(1991) experiment would alter the interpretation of questions. However,
the impact of the source on message interpretation has yet to be examined
systematically.
Although he Gricean maxims provide a useful framework for the
expectations communicators bring to communication situations, what
constitutes a violation of the maxims will depend in part on assumptions
about the speaker. Some investigators have begun to address this issue
theoretically, if not empirically. Hilton (in press) notes that dispositional
attributions (defined broadly to include personal characteristics, social
category memberships, goals, and the like) can affect how the Gricean
maxims are applied in message interpretation. Suspicions about the
reliability of a court witness, for instance, will affect listeners' beliefs about
the appropriateness of using the maxim of quality in interpreting his or her
testimony (see also Schwarz, 1994). Even when veracity is not a central
issue as it is in courtroom testimony, knowledge or beliefs about the
speaker can affect hearers' interpretations. Consider the following
example, suggested by Josef Shrock (personal communication):
Professor Why wasn't your paper in on time?
Student:
Because the planets were in line last night.
The student's response is an apparent violation of the maxim of relevance,
but Shrock observes that if the professor knew the student was a member
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of a astrologically-based religious cult, this perception might be revised.
Knowledge of the speaker may likewise influence interpretations of the
other maxims. No research to date has examined the role these factors in
everyday conversation.
3.3.2 Encoding of Intentions
Although Intentionalist models are in principle models of both
production and comprehension, virtually all research in this tradition has
focused on how people interpret messages. That speakers create messages
in accordance with Grice's cooperative principle and its associated maxims
has typically been taken as a given, rather than as a hypothesis for
investigation. For Intentionalist models to be able to account for both
production and comprehension, researchers must move beyond
experimental materials that incorporate predetermined communicative
intentions to the investigation of everyday language production. This
process will, however, require the development of more sophisticated ways
than are currently available of identifying speaker's intentions in ordinary
conversation.
Even if one accepts the cooperative principle and speech act theory as
models of message production, many issues remain unresolved: When and
why do speakers opt to express their intentions indirectly as opposed to
directly? When and why do they choose to flout particular conversational
maxims? What determines the choice of one form of indirect request, or
one figure of speech, rather than another? These issues have been
discussed theoretically (e.g., Gerrig & Gibbs, 1988; Glucksberg, 1989;
Ortony, 1975), but there is limited empirical work to support the claims
that have been made.
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Roberts and Kreuz (1994) elicited from speakers their reasons for
using various forms of nonliteral language (overstatement, metaphor,
irony, indirect requests, etc.), and found a number of clear-cut patterns.
Speakers reported they used overstatement to be humorous, to emphasize
content, and to clarify points, and understatement to de-emphasize
information and to express negative emotion. This study is a much-needed
step in the right direction; however, people's limited access to their own
mental processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) underscores the need for more
refined techniques to measure communicative intentions.
A few studies have examined the way the social context affects the
formulation of specific intentions. Francik and Clark (1985) found that
subjects designed indirect requests to take into account potential obstacles
the addressee might experience in trying to fulfill the request (e.g.,
willingness and ability to perform the task, memory for requested
information). Holtgraves & Yang (1992) investigated the effects of request
size, the relative power of the addressee, and social distance on the form of
American and Korean college students' requests and found that all three
factors, along with interactions among them, significantly affected the
politeness of the request. Their findings suggest both that the three
components of Brown and Levinson's model have psychological
significance, and that a simp0le, additive model is not adequate.
Interestingly, there is some evidence to suggest that adherence to
Grice's maxims and to politeness principles can have a negative effect on
communication. Person, Kreuz, Zwaan, & Graesser (in press) examined
tutoring dialogues, and found that tutors tended to avoid giving facethreatening negative feedback to students' vague or incorrect responses
even when this negative feedback would have been beneficial. Instead,
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they often gave positive feedback to incorrect answers while providing the
correct response. Person et al. argue that this practice may lead students to
believe that their original answers were correct and to overestimate their
understanding of the material. Similarly, Linde (1988) found that
politeness in airline pilot's requests and suggestions could lead to
misperceptions of their urgency or importance, and be contributing factors
in serious accidents.
3.3.3 Speaker-addressee asymmetries
Intentionalist models implicitly assume that successful
communication occurs; the investigator's task is to determine how it occurs.
In this respect, such models are not terribly different from straightforward
encoding-decoding models. The main difference lies in the relationship of
the literal utterance to the underlying message. Why might the encoding
and decoding of intentions be less straightforward than some theorists
appear to assume? It seems to us that the preoccupation of Intentionalist
models with message comprehension has lead investigators to overlook the
possibility that speakers and their addressees differ in what they perceive
to be relevant, truthful, and so on (Sarangi & Slembrouck, 1992; Sperber &
Wilson, 1986). The student in the earlier example who explained the
lateness of a paper by referring to the alignment of the planets may have
believed sincerely that he was following the maxims of quality and
relevance, but most professors would be unlikely to see it that way.
Sarangi and Slembrouck argue that most formulations of the cooperative
principle fail to consider cultural and individual differences in background
knowledge that can affect the way utterances are constructed and
interpreted according to Grice's maxims.
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Not only may speakers and addressees differ in terms of their
understanding of what does and does not conform to Grice's maxims, but
their conceptualizations of quality, quantity, relation, and manner may be
negotiable through conversational interaction in at least two senses. First,
through conversational interaction each participant can learn what the
other finds informative, as a quality violation, and so on. As Sarangi and
Slembrouck (1992) note, higher status participants may be able to enforce
their definitions as the standard for the conversation. Second, utterances
that appear to flout the maxims of quantity or relation do not always lead
to searches for alternative meanings, but rather to requests for clarification.
As we discuss in Section 5 below, there is a sense in which a message has
not communicated at all until it is "fixed" by both parties to the exchange
(Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). To answer these questions, intentionalist
models will need to move toward examining actual conversations in place
of pre-constructed experimental vignettes.
3.3.4 Interaction Goals
An utterance has both illocutionary and perlocutionary force. The
perlocutionary force of an utterance (i.e., the response it elicits from the
addressee) is a consequence of its illocutionary force, along with a complex
set of situational and motivational factors, none of which have been of
particular interest to students of language. However, the relation of an
utterance's illocutionary and perlocutionary force is hardly an accident.
Speakers formulate their utterances in order to accomplish particular ends,
and the way an utterance is formulated will be very much a consequence of
the end it is intended to accomplish. After all, the communicative intention
that underlies an utterance is itself a product of a more general goal toward
which the speaker's behavior is oriented. It makes sense to think of a
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perlocutionary intention (an intention to accomplish some specific result by
an act of speaking) as underlying the speaker's communicative intention.
Higgins and his colleagues (Higgins, 1981, 1992; Higgins, McCann &
Fondacaro, 1982) have pointed out that people employ language in an
effort to achieve a variety of different sorts of goals in interaction. Of
course, language is used to accomplish specific tasks (e.g., sharing
information for solving a problem), but it also is used in the service of
initiating or maintaining a social bonds (social relationship goals),
maintaining or changing the participants' self images (face goals), and
developing a common construction of the social world (social reality goals).
Often, an utterance will serve more than one goal, and the goals of the
interacting parties may not be identical. The assertion of a fact in response
to a question may serve the task goal of informing, but the utterance may
be formulated in a way that emphasizes the speaker's expertise — thus
enhancing the speaker's self image.
It seems reasonable to expect a relationship between the way
utterances are formulated and the interaction goals they are intended to
serve, but we are unaware of any attempts to develop this relationship in a
systematic way.
4. PERSPECTIVE-TAKING MODELS
4.1 Introduction
Perspective-taking models assume that individuals experience the
world from different vantage points, and that the nature of each
individual's experience is to some degree dependent upon the particular
vantage point he or she occupies. According to Piaget and Inhelder (1956)
the ability to appreciate differences between one's own and others'
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perspectives is an important early developmental achievement. Effects of
perspectival differences are most clearly seen when the individuals occupy
physically different vantage points, as in Piaget's original experiments, but
perspective-taking has come to denote points of view that derive from
differences in a variety of kinds of knowledge.
Perspective-taking models of language use focus on the shared
context that communicators must identify or create in order to produce and
comprehend messages. Shared contexts are constructed, at least in part,
through a process of reciprocal perspective-taking: Both speakers and
hearers must, in George Herbert Mead's familiar characterization, "take the
role or attitude of the other" — that is, each must try to experience the
situation as it is experienced by the other participants. By means of this
reciprocal process, the shared communicative context is continuously
expanded and refined.
The general idea that communicators tailor speech to their addressees
has been widely expressed (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Clark & Marshall, 1981;
Clark and Carlson, 1982; Krauss & Fussell, 1991; Mead, 1934; Rommetveit,
1974; Volosinov, 1986). In his seminal book On Message Structure , Ragnar
Rommetveit contended that
'taking the attitude of the other' constitutes an integral, basic, and
thoroughly intuitively mastered component of communication under
[a variety of] institutional and situational conditions....It constitutes
the most pervasive and most genuinely social aspect of our general
communicative competence..." (Rommetveit, 1974).
The same idea is stated more tersely by Roger Brown (1965) in the first
edition of his book, Social Psychology: "Effective coding requires that the
point of view of the auditor be realistically imagined." Perspective-taking
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models focus on the ways that participants' assumptions about each others'
perspectives constitute part of a message's interpretive context. For such
models, the social construction of meaning derives from participants'
implicit theories about what their partners know, feel, think, and believe.
Perspective-taking can be shown to occur at virtually all levels of
communication, from the most molecular to the most molar. At a relatively
molecular level, it can be shown that speakers adjust the articulation of
content words in accordance with a listener's informational requirements.
When context makes a word highly predictable ("A stitch in time saves
nine"), it will be articulated less intelligibly than it will in a sentence like
"The winning number is nine.," where the context is uninformative
(Lieberman, 1963; Hunnicut, 1985). Fowler (1987) has shown that the first
time a word is articulated in a discourse its duration is longer and its
amplitude is greater than in subsequent articulations, and these differences
affect the word's intelligibility in isolation. Such articulatory variations (or
"attunements," as Fowler terms them) seem to represent attempts by
speakers to make their messages' content intelligible, and reflect a rather
sophisticated implicit understanding of some elements of speech
perception. However, most studies in the perspective-taking tradition have
focused on communicators' attempts to affect message comprehensibility
by adjusting conceptual content in accordance with an addressee's point of
view.
4.1.1 Defining "Perspective"
Although many writers have endorsed the idea that perspectivetaking is fundamental to interpersonal communication, few have attempted
to specify with any precision just what constitutes a "perspective."
Graumann (1989) points out that historically the term has been used in a
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number of quite different ways in psychology. In psychophysics it refers to
the perceiver's angle of regard, while in personality and clinical
psychology, perspective-taking concerns the ability of one person to
empathize with the situation of another. In an attempt to specify some of
the components of another's perspective relevant to the psychology of
language and communication, Krauss and Fussell (1988) included: (a)
background knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes; (b) current interpretations of
stimuli and events; (c) plans, goals, and attitudes; (d) social context; and (e)
physical context. Other personal attributes can be added to this list,
including speech style, emotional state, and importantly, the other's current
state of message comprehension. Indeed, virtually any aspect of a person
might be thought of part of his/her perspective, and something that at least
potentially should be taken into consideration when formulating a
message. To summarize, a person's perspective consists of a combination
of relatively stable components (e.g., background knowledge, beliefs,
attitudes, etc.) in addition to such changing factors as vantage point,
moment-to-moment states of comprehension.
Virtually all Perspective-taking models regard an addressee's
representation of the speaker's perspective as a critical component of
his/her perspective. Some (e.g., Clark & Marshall, 1981) following
(Schiffer, 1972) argue that speakers and hearers must either directly
calculate, or conclude from the application of a heuristic, that a state of
mutual knowledge exists: i.e., that each participant both knows that a
particular state of affairs is true, and knows that the other knows, and
knows that the other knows the other knows, etc. ad infinitum (see Section
3.1.3). Others (e.g., Rommetveit, 198; Sperber, & Wilson, 1986) place
greater emphasis on the ability of addressees to infer information from the
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message that will enable them to fill in gaps in common ground. In this
way, messages themselves serve to create common ground. Theorists
differ in the way they view this aspect of common ground — i.e., whether
complete mutuality is required, or whether it is sufficient that the speaker
knows that the addressee knows that the speaker knows a particular fact
(see, e.g., the collection of papers in Smith, 1982). Nonetheless, although
most agree that at least some measure of reciprocity is required, little effort
has gone into specifying how much.18
4.1.2 Reference
The early discussions of the role of perspective-taking in
communication by Bakhtin, Mead and others were almost exclusively
theoretical, but beginning in the 1960's a substantial body of empirical
work has accumulated, focused primarily on the referential use of
language. Reference entails using language to designate some state of
affairs in the world. The state of affairs may be a singular object (a
particular dog), a category of objects (German shepherds), an abstract
concept (justice), a feeling, or some other specifiable thing. Although
reference is arguably the most elementary linguistic act, it underlies most
of the more complicated purposes to which language is put. In order to
perform an act of reference, a speaker must formulate a referring expression
— a word or phrase that will permit the addressee to identify the referent.
In his classic essay, "How shall a thing be called" Brown (1958) noted the
remarkable cognitive complexity that underlies a successful act of
reference. Most common objects can be referred to in more than one way,
and the way that is most appropriate will vary from situation to situation.
An effective act of reference requires the speaker to incorporate the
addressee's perspective into the referring expression.
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4.2 Research Findings
Research on perspective-taking typically has used experimental
paradigms in which speakers' communicative intentions are assigned by
the experimenter. For example, a speaker might be instructed to
characterize (e.g., name or describe) a picture of an object or an abstract
design, or to give someone directions to a destination. In practice,
investigators have employed two types of stimuli as the to-be-referred-to
items: stimuli for which there are pre-existing names (e.g., public figures,
kitchen utensils, architectural landmarks) or "innominate" items. chosen
because they do not resemble real-life objects and hence lack agreed-upon
names (e.g., abstract designs, Chinese Tangram figures; see Figure 2, Panels
A and B). The former can be used to examine how speakers' perceptions of
their addressee's background knowledge affect the referring expressions
applied to these stimuli. Because the latter type are uncodified — i.e., lack a
lexical entry that could serve as a conventional linguistic representation of
the item — they can be used to study the process by which communicators
coordinate or establish a joint perspective (e.g., how a speaker might come
to call the second stimulus in panel A of Figure 2 a "spider"). The aim of
these studies has been to assess how perspective-taking influences
linguistic aspects of speakers' messages, and how these linguistic
realizations of perspective-taking affect the communicative adequacy of the
messages.
----------------------------------------------------------Insert Figure 2 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------Perhaps the most commonly used experimental paradigm to study
the effects of perspective-taking on communication has been the so-called
referential communication paradigm in which one person describes or
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designates one item in an array of items in a way that will allow another
person can identify the target item. The paradigm allows the experimenter
to control such relevant factors as the relationship of the target item to the
other items in the array, real or attributed properties of the addressee, the
communication channel, etc. Notice that in this paradigm, the speaker's
communicative intention is assigned by the experimenter, and the aim is to
identify how that intention is realized linguistically by considering the
addressee's perspective.
We first review research on perspective-taking in non-conversational
contexts, in which the speakers' sole information about the addressee stems
from what they are told by the experimenter and what they infer from this
information. Then, we discuss research that has been carried out in
conversational contexts, in which hearers are able to modify speakers' prior
expectations about their perspective through the use of a variety of
feedback mechanisms.
4.2.1 Non-Conversational Paradigms
In studies of perspective-taking in non-conversational settings
subjects are typically asked to create names or descriptions for items in a
set of stimuli that will enable the intended recipient (another subject or the
subject him/herself) to select the referent from the full array. In most cases,
the communicative effectiveness of these messages is assessed by later
having subjects (the intended recipient and/or some other persons)
attempt to identify the referents of the messages. Two types of dependent
measures are used: measures that reflect perspective-taking in message
production (e.g., lexical choice, message length), and measures that reflect
the communicative effectiveness of the message (e.g., the recipient's
accuracy in selecting the intended referent). Non-interactive paradigms
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make it relatively easy to examine the effects of prior knowledge or beliefs
about the addressee on message production and comprehension in
situations in which no other evidence about that addressee (e.g., his/her
current focus of attention) is present. Non-interactive paradigms provide
an excellent opportunity to observe perspective-taking in action, and
virtually all studies using this procedure have supported the conclusion
that communicators adapt their messages to others' perspectives in a
number of respects.
Others' visual fields
As Piaget and Inhelder (1956) noted, each individual views the
environment from a different visual angle, and successful reference to
entities in that environment requires speakers to take the point of view of
their addressees. One aspect of the physical environment that differs
depending upon angle of view is the relative spatial arrangement of objects
and persons. Levelt (1983; 1989) has noted that there are a variety of ways
in which speakers can describe spatial locations: egocentrically, with
reference to themselves (e.g., "in front of me"), from their addressee's
perspective (e.g., "in front of you"); or from a mutual or "neutral"
perspective ("between us"). It has been suggested that speakers find
messages from egocentric perspectives easiest to produce, but that
addressee-based perspectives are easier to comprehend (Levelt, 1989;
Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976; Schober, 1993).
Several studies have examined how speakers' messages take such
differences in spatial perspective into account.19 Herrmann and his
associates (Herrmann, 1988) had subjects view computer screens
displaying two identical target objects, with a specification of the speaker's
and a hypothetical addressee's locations relative to these objects. Speakers'
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descriptions of the relative location of an object were more likely to take the
addressee's perspective as the difference in their vantage points increased.
Schober (1993) had subjects refer to one of two identical circles in different
locations in a visual display in a way that would allow an imaginary
addressee to identify the intended referent. Speakers tended to use either
matcher-centered (77%) or both-centered (21%) descriptions. Furthermore,
the tendency to use matcher-centered descriptions was substantially higher
(about 90%) when the vantage points were off-set rather than identical
(41%). These findings were replicated in a related study using a more
complex display in which several of each type of object were scattered in a
large circle in a manner similar to toppings on a pizza, Schober (1992,
Nov.).
The particular attributes of a referent speakers choose to include in
their referring expressions has been shown to vary depending on the array
of alternatives (Deutsch, 1976; Olson, 1970) but see Carroll, , 1985),
presumably because the informativeness of each attribute depends on
whether or not it is shared by other potential referents. However, several
studies have shown that "informativeness" (in this general sense) is not the
only criteria speakers use when formulating referring expressions in these
situations (e.g., Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982; Herrmann, 1983; Herrmann &
Deutsch, 1976; Mangold & Pobel, 1989). Speakers often include more than
the minimum information necessary to identify a stimulus, especially when
other attributes are of greater salience than the discriminating ones. These
findings have been interpreted as evidence for perspective-taking in
reference, and this interpretation is supported by fact that hearers'
identifications generally are somewhat more accurate when the additional
details are included. However, none of the studies ruled out the possibility
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that speaker's perceptual or thought processes, rather than an explicit
intention to assist the listener, was responsible for the effects.
In a better controlled study, Hupet, Seron, and Chantraine (1991)
created four sets of Tangram figures like those in Panel B of Figure 2 in
which discriminability and codability (i.e., the ease with which they could be
named out of context) were orthogonally varied. If the attributes of a high
codability stimulus incorporated into a referring expression were due
solely to the speaker's cognitive processes, we would anticipate no
difference between high and low discriminability conditions, but this is not
what Hupet et al. found. Rather, although speakers used names alone
when discriminability was high, they virtually always added identifying
information to the name when it was not, suggesting that communicators
anticipate addressees' potential problem in identifying the referent.
The findings of these studies are consistent with the proposition that
speakers take their addressees' visual environments into account in
formulating messages, but Perspective-taking models make a much
stronger claim about the role of the addressee in message production: Not
only do speakers consider relatively transparent aspects of others' points of
view, but they also rely on their own mental representations of others'
knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and so on.
Generalized conceptualizations of others
Mead (1934) contended that the most fundamental distinction a
language user had to make was between the self and another person, and a
number of investigators have examined how the distinction is reflected
linguistically. Krauss, Vivekananthan & Weinheimer (1968) had subjects
name or describe color chips either for their own use or for someone else,
and found that the labels more accurately communicated to others when
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they were originally intended for another person. Messages intended for
another person tended to draw on conventional color terminology or the
colors of familiar objects, while those intended for a subjects own use were
more likely to use idiosyncratic and essentially private associations (e.g.,
"the color of my bedspread"). Similar results have been reported by
Gatewood & Rosenwein (1985), Innes (1976) and Kaplan (1952).
In a more recent study, we (Fussell & Krauss, 1989a) found that
descriptions of nonsense figures, such as those in Panel A of Figure 2, were
more than twice as long on average when they were intended for another
person's use, as contrasted to one's own use. In addition, messages
formulated for a subject's own use more often characterized stimuli
figuratively, in terms of objects they resembled, than did messages for
others. Presumably, speakers describing the stimuli for others avoided
figurative characterizations when the resemblance between the stimulus
and the object might not be apparent to the addressee. Instead, they based
their descriptions on the stimulus's geometric elements. We also found
that the communicative adequacy of a description was affected by the
perspective taken by its creator: People were better able to select the
referents of messages formulated for another's use compared to messages
formulated for the creator's own use.
Categories of addressees
In the studies we have described, speakers knew nothing about their
addressee except, perhaps, that he or she was a fellow student. The effects
of perspective taking on message production and comprehension are not,
however, limited to the self/other distinction. Individuals are members of
a variety of social categories (e.g., parent, psychologist, sports fan, New
Yorker), and these categories can serve as a basis for inferences about their
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perspectives. Given the knowledge that someone is a baseball fan and a
psycholinguist, one can assume that he or she will know that the Cardinals
are from St. Louis and that an "allophone" is not a French telephone. We
would expect speakers to consider the social category memberships of their
addressees when formulating their referring expressions, and research
suggests that they do.
Early support for this notion came from a field experiment by
Kingsbury (1968), who found that responses to requests for directions were
longer and more detailed when the requester was perceived as an "out-oftowner" rather than as a local, presumably because respondents assumed
that out-of-towners would require more information. The sensitivity of
respondents in this natural situation to the addressee's presumed
perspective was striking. Asking for directions in a noticeably nonlocal
accent produced the same results as explicitly identifying oneself as an outof-towner. An addressee's social category memberships also influence the
extent to which speakers tailor spatial descriptions to that listener's point of
view. Graf (described in Herrmann, 1988) found that students were more
likely to use addressee-centered references when the addressee was
identified as a child or professor, rather than another student.
Kogan (1989), investigating the effects of the addressee's age category
on elderly and middle-aged adults descriptions of the nonsense figures
originally used by Krauss & Weinheimer (1964; 1966), found that speakers
tended to use more figurative descriptions with members of their own age
group.20
The Kingsbury and the Graf studies demonstrate how others'
category membership can affect the message production process.
However, neither measured the communicative effectiveness of the
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messages for addressees who are members of the intended social category
or members of other social categories. To date, there is very limited
evidence on this issue using a non-conversational paradigm, and such
evidence as exists is mixed. Kogan (1989) found that elderly speakers'
message were poorly understood by both middle-aged and elderly
addressees. Unfortunately, the report is somewhat sketchy, and it is
difficult to determine the source of these difficulties. Nonetheless, as we
shall see below, there is substantial evidence from conversational
paradigms demonstrating effects of category-based perspective-taking on
comprehension.
Individual characteristics of addressees
Although social category memberships are an important source of
information about another's perspective, often this information can be
supplemented by direct knowledge of the addressee When individuals
interact over time, they have an opportunity to amass a stock of what Clark
and Schaefer (1987) term "personal knowledge" — shared information
drawn from their accumulated shared experiences. In combination with
the more public common ground shared as members of the same social
groups, this personal knowledge can be utilized by speakers to formulate
informative messages. Consistent with this assumption, Fussell and
Krauss (1989b) found that descriptions addressed to a specific friend
communicated more effectively to that friend than to a randomly selected
recipient.
Interaction over time also leads to a growing awareness of others'
attitudes towards issues, other individuals, and the like. Although there is
little evidence on how attitudinal components of others' perspectives are
assessed and used in message formulation, several studies by Higgins and
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his associates support the conclusions that these factors are indeed
considered by the speaker (see Higgins, 1992; McCann & Higgins, 1992, for
a review). Higgins and Rholes (1978) found that messages describing
particular target persons tended to incorporate information biased in the
direction of the addressee's opinion of the target person, and to minimize
details inconsistent with the addressee's perspective. In a later study,
McCann, Higgins and Fondacaro (1991) found that individual subjects
adapted their messages to each of to different addressees when there was
little delay between the two conversations.21
Building models of the addressee
In many non-conversational settings (e.g., writing articles, giving
lectures) communicators will refer to the same object or concept more than
once, and, to do so felicitously they must update their model of their
addressees in accordance with what they have said previously. One
mechanism that is employed is the use of indefinite and definite articles to
distinguish between initial acts of reference and subsequent ones (Linde &
Labov, 1975; Osgood, 1971; Sridhar, 1988). In English, use of the definite
article implies that the noun it precedes is "given" (rather than "new")
information (Bolinger, 1972; Clark & Clark, 1975), and thereby part of the
communicators' common ground.
Hupet and Chantraine (1992) found evidence that subjects use
definite articles to indicate the "givenness" of information. They had
subjects describe Tangram figures over the course of four trials, and varied
whether the speaker thought the same addressee or a new one would
receive their messages on each trial. Although the total number of words
per figure did not change across trials in either condition,22 subjects who
thought they were addressing the same individual on subsequent trials
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were more likely to use definite references and to introduce one-word
labels for the stimuli than those who thought they were addressing
different people each time. Curiously, however, these differences did not
appear to affect the accuracy with which an actual listener could identify
the intended target.
Although these studies demonstrate that communicators can modify
their mental model of the addressee over the course of a narrative, other
evidence suggests that the process of updating can be problematic for
communicators. According to Traxler and Gernsbacher (1992; 1993),
successful messages require the active construction of a representation of
the addressee, and in non-conversational settings this may be difficult
because communicators lack information about how well their messages
are being understood. In a series of studies, Traxler and Gernsbacher
examined how feedback from readers affects writers' ability to construct
successful referring expressions. In one study (Traxler & Gernsbacher,
1992, Experiment 1) subjects tried to write descriptions of Tangram figures
that would enable another person to identify the figure in an array
consisting figures that were targets on other trials and several distracters.
These descriptions were given to twno subjects, who attempted to identify
the correct referent. Subsequently, half of the original writers were
provided with information as to how many of their messages were
correctly understood and the other half was not. Then, each writer created
modified descriptions of the same figures. The same subjects read the
modified descriptions, and then the procedure was repeated a third time.
When writers received feedback, the communicative effectiveness of
their messages increased on each trial; without feedback, no improvement
was seen. In subsequent studies, Traxler and Gernsbacher demonstrated
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that the effects of feedback transferred to descriptions of other Tangram
figures (Traxler & Gernsbacher, 1992, Experiment 2), and that having the
writer perform the reader's task was also an effective means of providing
feedback (Traxler & Gernsbacher, 1993). Traxler and Gernsbacher argue
that writers attempt to take their audience's perspective into account when
they create their messages, but that they have difficulty constructing an
accurate view of the audience when feedback is unavailable.23
Summary and conclusions
Studies using the non-interactive paradigm illustrate the effect of
perspective-taking on message construction and interpretation, but the
non-interactive (often written) mode of communication limits the
generalizability of their findings and leaves unanswered many questions
about the way perspective-taking operates in the most common
communicative situation — conversation. Perspective-taking in noninteractive contexts tends to be conceptualized in a static, all-or-none
fashion (e.g., the other either is or is not a member of a particular social
category; certain knowledge either is or is not accessible to the other, etc.).
Such characterizations are inappropriate for dynamic forms like
conversation, in which each participant's mental model of the other may
change on a moment-to-moment basis. For this reason, among others,
much current research on perspective-taking employs situations in which
immediate feedback from the addressee is available.
4.2.2 Perspective-Taking in Conversation
In conversational contexts, communicators can draw upon
information from a variety of sources. These include overt questions and
comments, vocal back-channel responses (e.g., "uhuh," "um") and nonvocal
back-channels (e.g., smiles, gaze, head nods) (see, for example, (Duncan &
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Fiske, 1977; Kendon, 1967; Schegloff, 1982; Yngve, 1970), and somewhat
more indirectly, the appropriateness of the addressee's subsequent
contributions or actions. The availability of feedback has several
interrelated effects on communication, of which two are specifically
relevant to Perspective-taking models.
First, feedback reduces the pressure on a speaker to create a fully
communicative message at the outset, since additional talk can be used to
clarify misunderstandings (Auer, 1984; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Sacks
& Schegloff, 1979). For instance, speakers can use "try-markers" (rises in
intonation at the end of declarative statements) to mark propositions as
potentially problematic for the listener, and to indicate that the speaker is
prepared to expand on them if necessary. They may also use "installment"
phrases (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) which provide information
incrementally, with pauses between segments for listener feedback to allow
the listener to signal understanding, as in "John, ... the guy downstairs, ...
whom we met yesterday ..." (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979). A third device
speakers can use is "pre-sequences" (Jefferson, 1975), or preliminary queries
(e.g., "Do you remember John?") to establish whether some body of
knowledge is or is not part of the shared communicative environment,
prior to the formulation of a referring expression proper. Thus, in
comparison to non-interactive contexts, feedback greatly increases a
speaker's options for creating referring expressions.
The availability of feedback also enables communicators to
accumulate a stock of common ground that can be drawn upon in future
interaction. Speakers can propose names and descriptions, and determine
the addressee's comprehension immediately. By so doing, they can be
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more confident that the addressee has understood, and build on this shared
knowledge in subsequent messages.
To examine these processes, researchers have developed an
interactive version of the referential communication task, in which
speakers and hearers communicate directly, usually in the same place at
the same time. One person, whom we will call the director, following Clark
& Wilkes-Gibbs' (1986) terminology, must refer to a series of stimuli such
that another person, called the matcher, can identify the intended referent in
the full array. Matchers are typically separated from directors by a barrier,
but different studies vary the freedom with which participants are allowed
to converse. Typically the elements of stimulus array are arranged in one
order for the director and in a different order for the matcher, and the
director's task is to name or describe each stimulus in a way that will
permit the matcher to identify it.
Reference in interactive context
As we have noted, the availability of feedback allows speakers to
create messages in ways that they cannot in non-interactive contexts.
When assessing Perspective-taking models a key comparison is between
directors' first messages for each referent before feedback from the
addressee has been provided and messages created in a non-interactive
condition. Several studies have found significant differences between the
two. For instance, Schober (1992) found that directors' descriptions of
spatial locations were less likely to take the matcher's perspective in the
interactive Pairs condition than in the Solo condition. Comparable
differences between referring expressions in interactive and non-interactive
settings have been found for conceptual perspective-taking. For instance,
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Fussell (1990, Experiment 2) found that referring expressions for public
figures were significantly longer in the non-interactive condition.
Building shared perspectives.
As they interact, communicators receive additional bits of evidence
that allow them to fine-tune their assumptions about each other's
perspective. Several investigators have examined the development of
referring expressions over time, using some version of the interactive
referential communication paradigm both with uncodified stimuli, and
with objects and concepts that have conventional names.
In an early study, Krauss & Weinheimer (1964, 1967) found that when
pairs of communicators repeatedly referred to nonsense figures like those
depicted in Figure 3.1, panel A, their descriptions became more succinct
over successive occasions of mention. For example, "looks like a Martini
glass with legs on each side," might gradually be shortened to "Martini,"
(see Figure 3). This abbreviation phenomenon has been replicated in
several studies using nonsense figures (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Hupet,
Chantraine, & Neff, 1993; Hupet et al., 1991; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992),
persons, locations and objects (Clark & Schaefer, 1987; Fussell, & Krauss,
1992; Garrod & Anderson, 1987; Isaacs & Clark, 1987; Schober, 1993). The
tendency for referring express ions to grow shorter over successive
occasions of mention has been interpreted as support for the idea that
conversational partners construct a shared perspective on the referent they
use for subsequent communication, an interpretation supported by studies
showing that when feedback is delayed or otherwise disrupted, the
abbreviation process is affected (Krauss & Bricker, 1966; Krauss &
Weinheimer, 1966).
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----------------------------------------------------------Insert Figure 3 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------For speakers to make the best use of feedback, not only must it be
provided in a timely fashion, but it must be provided by all addressees.
Kraut, Lewis and Swezey (1982) found that feedback had both general and
individuating effects on message quality. It improved the comprehension
of both intended addressees and overhearers, but it benefited the
comprehension of addressees more than that of overhearers. Presumably,
feedback provides speakers with moment-to-moment information about an
addressee's perspectives, and allows messages to be tailored more precisely
to that addressee's informational needs (see also Schober & Clark, 1989). In
addition, speakers do not assume that joint perspectives achieved with one
conversational partner can be extended to new partners; rather they strive
to re-establish a shared orientation with the new partner (e.g., WilkesGibbs & Clark, 1992).
While it is obvious that feedback plays an important role in
coordinating conversation, less is known about how speakers and hearers
produce and understand feedback. The subtlety of the processes involved
is illustrated in an experiment by Chen (1990), who had subjects
communicate in a standard referential communication task using Tangram
figures resembling those used by Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, but different in
one important respect. In the Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs study, as in most such
studies (but see Traxler & Gernsbacher, 1992, 1993), the sets of stimuli
participants had on a given trial were identical. In Chen's study, however,
unbeknownst to the participants, on certain trials some of the figures in one
participant's set were distorted versions of figures in the other's set. As a
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consequence, for these distorted pairs one participant's description was not,
from the other's perspective, a really good description of any of the stimuli
in the set. Chen videotaped the interactions and coded a number of verbal
and nonverbal behaviors. He found clear differences between the
addressee's behavior on "normal" and "distorted" trials. For example, head
nods, smiles, and brief verbal interjections such as "yeah" or "uh-huh" were
about twice as frequent when both participants had the same set of stimuli.
Interestingly, although Chen had expected to find evidence of "signals of
disconfirmation" (e.g., frowns or head shakes in place of a smile or a nod)
to indicate the message had not communicated well, that is not what he
observed. Rather, it appears that participants signal disconfirmation by
withholding back-channel responses at points where they are expected.
Such feedback, and the knowledge of its availability, transforms the
communication situation in an important way. It permits the speaker to
modify tentatively formulated assumptions about what the listener knows
as the interaction proceeds. In this way, feedback can mitigate some of the
consequences of biases implicit in communicators assumptions about
others' perspectives. Although we describe the process as perspective
taking, it may be more useful to think of perspective as something that is
achieved (rather than taken) in the course of interaction. In effect, the
availability of feedback redistributes the cognitive load of message
production and comprehension. If the speaker is cognizant of the momentto-moment state of the addressee's understanding, there is less need to rely
on a model of the addressee's knowledge constructed from prior
assumptions; consequently, there is less need to engage in the complex
processing required to formulate effective models. Conversely, an
addressee who finds a message ambiguous or incomprehensible can avoid
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some of the cognitive work involved in making sense of it by signaling a
lack of comprehension.
Current feedback vs. prior beliefs
Clearly, feedback is important for perspective-taking. What is not
clear is whether feedback alone is sufficient to coordinate meaning in a
timely fashion. There is reason to believe that it is not. For example, before
any feedback has been received, speakers must create an initial message,
which requires that the speaker make some appraisal, however tentative,
about what the other knows. Try-markers, installment noun phrases, and
pre-sequences can mitigate the effects of erroneous inferences by requiring
that the listener signal comprehension of sequentially presented
propositions, but their overuse runs the risk of insulting the listener. Use
of a try-marker with a commonly-known fact allows for the possibility that
the addressee is ignorant of it, and may be taken as a reflection of the
speaker's assessment of the addressee. Imagine someone describing a
building's architecture as "…something like the White House?…You know,
where the President lives?…In Washington, DC.?" The maxim of quantity
(Grice, 1975) would lead one to the conclusion that the speaker does regard
the addressee as well informed.
How do speakers go about formulating a tentative model of the
other's perspective in the absence of feedback? A likely possibility is that
they use an addressee's social category memberships to make an initial
assessment, and then use feedback to modify that assessment as necessary.
Fussell and Krauss (1992), Experiment 2) tested this hypothesis by first
assessing speakers' assumptions about their addressees, and then
examining how these assumptions found expression in language. Dyads
were run in a conversational version of the referential communication
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similar to that used by Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986). Consistent with a
Perspective-taking model, prior beliefs about the listener's perspective
affected the way speakers referred to the objects: As the perceived
probability that the listener would know the referent's name declined,
speakers provided more additional identifying information. However, the
effect, while statistically reliable, was considerably smaller than one might
predict from noninteractive experiments. Indeed, many speakers referred
to the objects by name and provided little or no additional identifying
information, even when the perceived likelihood that the other would
know the object's name was low. Similar results were found when public
figures were used as stimuli (Fussell & Krauss, 1992, Experiment 1).
Further evidence that both feedback and prior knowledge about
addressee's social categories is important to perspective-taking comes from
a study by Isaacs and Clark (1987) using a referential communication task
in which participants communicated about New York City landmarks.
Isaacs and Clark found that within the first few exchanges of talk, speakers
had adapted their referring expressions to their addressee's degree of
familiarity with New York City. What is of particular interest is that
speakers appeared to use their classifications of the addressee's expertise to
generate expectations about the likely familiarity of other landmarks.
4.3 Issues and Limitations
The studies reviewed in this section demonstrate that perspectivetaking based on both prior beliefs and on interactional feedback, plays a
fundamental role in communication. The role of prior beliefs is much
stronger in non-conversational contexts, in which speakers are denied the
opportunity to revise their messages on the basis of the addressee's
apparent understanding. A number of issues involved in perspective
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taking remain poorly understood. In this section, we briefly describe
several of them.
4.3.1 Assessing Perspective
A serious shortcoming of current models is that most investigators
simply have assumed that perspective taking occurs, without trying to
understand the process by which it is accomplished. Little effort has gone
into identifying what it is that participants actually assume about their
partners. Instead, there has been a tendency toward circular reasoning in
the identification of speakers' assumptions about their addressees'
perspectives and the effects of these assumptions on message formulation
(Krauss & Fussell, 1988). For example, from a lengthy description of the
route to a destination, one might conclude both that the speaker assumed
the addressee was unfamiliar with the area, and that the speaker created a
longer message to compensate for this lack of familiarity (cf., Kingsbury,
1968). To avoid this circularity, it is important to ensure that the
addressee's perspective is the determining factor in message production,
rather than such other factors as cognitive load or salience (Brown & Dell,
1987). Although studies that compare messages for different categories of
addressees provide evidence of perspective-taking, it still is important to
verify that the subject as well as the experimenter has identified the
addressee as a member of a particular category.
A few studies have examined speakers' inferences about their
audience, independent of the message produced, and these studies have
demonstrated that the task of taking another person's perspective may be
more difficult than typically assumed. As part of our study of men and
women's conversations about everyday objects (Fussell & Krauss, 1992,
Experiment 2), for example, we asked an independent group of subjects to
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estimate the proportion of undergraduates who could name each of the
stimuli. Their estimates were impressively accurate, even when the
estimator him or herself didn't know knew the name of the item. However,
estimates tended to be strongly biased in the direction of the estimator's
own knowledge—those who knew an object's name tended to overestimate
its identifiability and those who didn't know the named tended to
underestimate it. These results have been replicated with other types of
knowledge, including public figures (Fussell & Krauss, 1992, Experiment
1), New York City landmarks (Fussell & Krauss, 1991) and general
knowledge questions (Nickerson, Baddeley, & Freeman, 1987), as well as
for behaviors and attitudes (Fussell, 1992; Nisbett & Kunda, 1985). It is
likely that other cognitive biases also influence the assessment of others'
perspectives.24
Similarly, relatively little attention has been paid to how speakers
come to understand that prior assumptions about their addressees must be
modified. In some cases, misunderstandings are clear from addressees'
verbal or physical responses, and suitable repairs can be made (Fox, 1987).
But Chen (1990) found that withholding backchannel information was an
important means by which addressees informed the speaker about their
comprehension. Although addressees will often a lack of understanding
directly ("Who's he?", "I'm not sure what you mean," etc.), the process by
which such signals are conveyed in the backchannel (Yngve, 1970) can be
quite subtle, and may depend heavily on the participants' history of
interaction with one another.
4.3.2 Individual Differences In Perspective-Taking
For practical reasons, studies of perspective taking has focused on
the linguistic practices of college students. Taking another's point of view
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is not something that young children do well, and the ability appears to
develop as the child matures (e.g., Glucksberg et al., 1975). It would be
reasonable to expect individual and group differences in the ability of
adults to assess others' perspectives, as well, and there is some evidence
that such differences exist. For instance, Kogan's (1989) study, described
above, found that messages created by elderly adults were less
communicative than those by middle aged adults (see also Hupet et al.,
1993, described below).
Significant differences within age categories may exist, as well.
Hupet and Chantraine (1992) found that while half of the subjects in the
"same addressee" condition of their non-conversational task used an
increasing number of definite references and labels on successive trials
(indicating a shifting model of the addressee over time), the other half did
not. Such results may reflect differences in people's ability to assess others'
perspectives. This interpretation is plausible in spatial perspective-taking,
where it has been shown that subjects require more time to create messages
that take into account the addressee's perspective as that perspective is
increasingly offset from the speaker's own point of view (Herrmann et al.
1987). Such considerations suggest that perspective-taking studies might
benefit from subjects drawn more widely from the general population, and
from looking for individual or subgroup differences within such samples.
4.3.3 Effects of perspective-taking on message characteristics
Understanding how perspective-taking is accomplished is only the
first step in understanding how perspective-taking affects communication.
The next, much more difficult, step is to understand how assessments of
others' perspectives are implemented in message formulation. There is
substantial evidence that perspective-taking affects message length and the
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use of figurative descriptions, but much more research will be required to
explicate these processes fully. In all likelihood, simple measures like
length will be inadequate for understanding reference to more complex
objects and abstract concepts. For example, speakers may choose to
describe an abstract concept in metaphorical rather than literal terms. In
such cases, identifying perspective-taking components to the message will
require an understanding of the speakers' other options, which might
include analogies and other metaphors, in addition to literal statements.
Although observational studies (e.g., Auer, 1984; Sacks & Schegloff,
1979; Schegloff, 1972) suggest that the use of try-markers, installment
phrases, pre-sequences, and related devices reflect speakers' attempts to
tailor their messages to their addressee's perspective, such observations
provide less-than-conclusive evidence that the speaker actually is thinking
about the addressee's needs during message formulation. Try-markers can
be used when the listener's ability to identify the referent is less than
certain, but they also have other functions (e.g., marking the speaker's own
hesitancy about the proposition expressed). The student who replies
"Beethoven?" with rising intonation to the question "Who wrote the
Brandenburg Concertos" is not signaling that the inquisitor might not know
the answer. Typically, researchers try to infer the function a try-marker
serves from the context -- a method that can involve circular reasoning.
Sophisticated investigative procedures will be necessary to understand the
role played by interactive forms of reference in perspective-taking.
4.3.4 Multiple Listeners
A major challenge for Perspective-taking models is situations in
which more than one addressee is present. Two broad classes of situations
can be identified: situations in which a speaker wants to convey the same
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message to everyone present despite differences in perspective, and the
more complicated case in which a speaker wants to convey different
messages to different hearers.
The first category of situations, typical of multiparty conversation,
classroom lectures, and the like, has not to our knowledge been studied
empirically. Speakers might deal with multiple hearers in a number of
ways: they might try to take into account the perspective of each group
member; they might generalize across the group, they may consider the
'normative addressee' (Volosinov, 1986). Factors influencing a speaker's
strategy might include the type of discourse, the importance of accurate
communication, the number of participants, and the relative status or
importance of particular participants.
The second situation, in which the speaker wants to convey different
messages to different hearers, can arise in a variety of circumstances.
Parents may want to speak cryptically (e.g., about toys or candy) in front of
their children, friends conversing in public may want discuss private
matters without being understood by eavesdroppers. In interactions
involving multiple listener, different listeners may have quite different
"participatory statuses" (addressees, intended hearers, overhearers, etc.
(Bell, 1980; Clark & Carlson, 1982; Goffman, 1976), and these will determine
the perspectives the speaker must take into account in formulating a
message. When faced with the problem of unwanted overhearers, the
speaker must assess both what will be comprehensible to the addressee
and what will not be comprehensible to the overhearer (Clark & Schaefer,
1987). We will return to this topic in Section 5.
In some cases, speakers may be faced with two sets of intended
addressees who not only differ in their background knowledge and
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perspective, but will differ dramatically in these respects. In such situations,
speakers may be forced to convey simultaneously one message to one
audience and a different message to another audience. This situation has
been dubbed the multiple audience problem by John Fleming and John Darley
(1991; 1990; Fleming, 1994), who found that high school students can
formulate messages to communicate one meaning to their peers and
another to their parents. The students accomplish this by relying on teen
slang and specialized knowledge unfamiliar to their parents. The problem
is a simple one when subjects are permitted to employ prearranged signals,
but subjects in these experiments show some ability to coordinate on an
implicit interpretive context without prior agreement. It remains to be seen
whether similar findings will be obtained with other types of mixed
audiences are present, or when the solution to the problem is not as easy as
reliance on in-group language.
4.3.5 Other Components of Perspective.
Studies of perspective taking have focused almost exclusively on
referential communication, and the kind of reference involved typically has
been to concrete things or nonsense figures. Researchers have exploited
this technique to examine a variety of complex aspects of the
communication process, but the task itself strongly constrains the content
of communication. In such situations, communication tends to be concrete
rather than abstract, literal rather than figurative, concerned with sensory
data rather than beliefs or feelings, with matters that are public rather than
private. Discussion of perspective-taking in the communication of abstract
concepts is rare, although there is some reason to believe that this domain
may yield important insights.
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Much talk with others concerns affective information — attitudes,
evaluations, opinions, feelings, etc. To communicate effectively about such
content, communicators probably take a variety of factors in addition to
their addressees' knowledge and beliefs into account. Apart from the work
by Higgins and his colleagues (e.g., Higgins & Rholes, 1978; Higgins,
McCann, & Fondacaro, 1982; McCann et al., 1991), the topic has received
little attention. Note that in these experiments, speakers were specifically
informed of their addressees' attitudes, but in much conversation, these
components of perspective must be inferred.
4.3.6 Perspective-taking and interaction goals
Earlier (Section 3.3.5) we observed that little consideration had been
given to the question of how a speaker's perlocutionary intentions
interacted with the an utterance's form. The problem is complicated by the
fact that speakers often try to accomplish more than one thing with an act
of speaking (e.g., to convey information and to initiate a social
relationship), and the particular locution will reflect what the speaker is
trying to accomplish.
Interaction goals also can influence how a listener's perspective is
reflected in message formulation. For example, the extent to which
speakers adjust a description of a target person to reflect the addressee's
attitude toward that target is dependent on the speaker's and addressee's
relative statuses, at least for speakers who are high in authoritarianism
(Higgins & McCann, 1984). When the speaker and addressee are of the
same status, high and low authoritarians adjust their descriptions in the
direction of the addressee's opinion about the same amount. But when the
addressee's status is higher, high authoritarians increase the extent of such
adjustment, while the descriptions of low authoritarians remain the same.
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Higgins and McCann interpret this difference as a reflection of differences
in high and low authoritarians' interaction goals.
4.3.7 Hearers' Use of Speakers' Perspectives
A criticism of Intentionalist models was that they focus
predominantly on the listener's side of the communicative process. The
complementary criticism can be raised for Perspective-taking models:
Despite the intention of the model to encompass both speaking and
comprehending, overwhelmingly the work to date has examined the
speaking side of the process. Only a handful of studies deal with
perspective-taking in message comprehension. Fussell (1991) found that
the interpretation of personality metaphors depended upon the perception
of the speaker's attitude toward the person being described. In their study
of demonstrative reference, Clark and his colleagues' (1983) found that
hearers assumed speakers intended Ronald Reagan when the message was
"you know who this man is, don't you?" and David Stockton when it was
"do you have any idea whatsoever who this man is?" Although it was not
tested explicitly in this study, it is clear that the addressee's interpretation
of the utterances was dependent upon a model of the speaker's background
knowledge. In our study of everyday objects (Fussell & Krauss, 1992) we
observed that listeners who were knowledgeable in a particular domain
often asked confirming questions when novice speakers used the objects'
names, presumably to be sure the speaker knew what he or she was talking
about. Such observations need to be examined systematically.
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5. DIALOGIC MODELS
5.1 Introduction
Each of the three models we have discussed explains interpersonal
communication in terms of participants' individual acts of production and
comprehension. It is a speaker's task to produce utterances that will
adequately convey a particular meaning; it is the addressee's task to
process these utterances, and by so doing to identify the speaker's
intended meaning. Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) have dubbed such a
conceptualization a "literary model" of language use. However, many
modern literary theorists think about the process by which texts convey
meanings in considerably more subtle and complex ways (cf., Eagleton,
1983). Consider the following observation by the influential Russian
philosopher and literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin.
Verbal interaction is the fundamental reality of language. Dialog, in
the narrowest sense of the term, is but one form, albeit the most
important to be sure … But dialogue can be understood in a broader
sense, meaning by it not only direct … communication between two
persons, but also all verbal communication, whatever its form (as
quoted in Todorov, 1984, p. 113).
The utterance is constructed between two socially organized persons,
and, should there not be present an actual interlocutor, one is
presupposed in the person of the normal representative…of the social
group to which the speaker belongs (as quoted in Todorov, 1984, p.
101).
Underlying Bakhtin's view is the assumption that face-to-face
interaction (or conversation) is the primary site of language use.. It
undoubtedly was the context in which language evolved, and it is
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universally the context in which it is learned.25 Use of language in other
circumstances (electronic mail, novels, television newscasts, etc.) derives
from conversational language use, but is different in several important
respects. The features that shape the nature of conversation are (1) the realtime constraints on production and comprehension under which
participants in conversations operate, and (2) the responsiveness that face-toface interaction affords.
Producing spontaneous speech requires the speaker simultaneously
to perform two cognitively demanding tasks: conceptualizing what is to be
conveyed, and formulating a linguistic structure that is capable of
conveying it (Levelt, 1989). Conversational speech is fundamentally
different from rehearsed speech and from messages that are written.
Conversational speech must be produced in a reasonably continuous
stream, and there is little opportunity for speakers to reconceptualize the
content, consult a "mental thesaurus" for a word that will express the
precise nuance of meaning intended, experiment with alternative syntactic
structures, etc., as might be done by someone composing a written message
Similarly, from the listener's point of view, speech is evanescent.
Once it has been produced, it must be processed and comprehended. One
cannot process at a slower rate when a complex syntactic structure is
encountered, go back and review what was said earlier, underline or make
marginal notes, etc., as might be done by a reader. Because conversational
speech is produced at a rate of about 2.5 words per second, production and
comprehension could pose formidable problems for two completely
autonomous information processors. Yet, participants typically come away
from conversations believing they have communicated successfully, and
objective evidence probably would indicate that they have.
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One reason people are able to communicate as well as they do in such
adverse circumstances is that the exquisite responsiveness of conversation
(and similar interactive forms) permits them to formulate messages that are
closely attuned to each others' immediate knowledge and perspectives, and
thereby reduce the cognitive demands of production and comprehension.
The participant who at a given moment occupies the role of speaker can
determine virtually instantaneously whether the addressee has identified
communicative intentions correctly. Simultaneously the addressee can
reveal the nature of his or her understanding as it develops, and in this
manner guide the future production of the speaker.
Examination of what is said in real conversations, particularly
conversations in which the participants are intently involved, suggests that
grammatically-well-formed utterances and felicitously accomplished
speech acts are relatively rare. Often sentences trail off inconclusively or
are left dangling incomplete, listeners interrupt to ask questions, interject
comments and finish sentences, topics change abruptly and unpredictably,
and what is left unsaid may convey more than what is explicitly stated. It
is an unusually articulate person who is able to read a transcript or listen to
a recording of his or her spontaneous speech without being struck by its
incoherence and lack of fluency. However, it is a mistake to regard such
conversational speech as a defective version of some ideal form. Rather,
these apparent deficiencies reflect the way conversation operates as a
communicative process.
What we will call Dialogic models take conversational speech as the
model for communication. From this perspective, a communicative
exchange is not the combined outputs of two autonomous information
processors, but rather a joint accomplishment of the participants, who have
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collaborated to achieve some set of communicative goals. Individual
contributions can't be defined apart from the interaction situation. From
the Dialogic perspective, meaning is "socially situated" -- deriving from the
particular circumstances of the interaction -- and the meaning of an
utterance can be understood only in the context of those circumstances.
An important way in which Dialogic models differ from those
previously discussed is their view of the goals of participants in
communication. Despite their many differences, all of the three models we
discussed earlier assume that people communicate to convey information.
But for Dialogic theorists the goal of communication is the achievement of
intersubjectivity. Information exchange does, of course, occur, but as a
means of reaching the intersubjective state. The general idea of
intersubjectivity (although perhaps not the term itself) has broad historical
resonances within social psychology. Indeed, some social psychologists
regard the human ability to establish intersubjectivity as the foundation
upon which the social order rests.
The Norwegian social psychologist Ragnar Rommetveit may have
been the first to apply the concept specifically to communication. In his
seminal essay "On the architecture of intersubjectivity," he developed the
thesis that even the simplest communicative act rests upon the participants'
mutual commitment to "…a temporarily shared social world" (1974, p. 29).
In Rommetveit's view, intersubjectivity is a structure that emerges from the
process of interaction. It is neither implicit in the knowledge participants
bring to the situation, nor is it explicitly coded in language. "Mutual
understanding can[not] … be accounted for in terms of either
unequivocally shared knowledge of the world or linguistically mediated
meaning" (1980, p. 109). Rather, for each interaction it must be constructed
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anew. Out of the divergent social realities participants bring to the
situation, intersubjectivity is fashioned and continually modified by acts of
communication. In this way, "…what is made known by what is said is
affected by what is tacitly taken for granted, and vice-versa" (Rommetveit,
1980, p. 76).
Within psychology, the most fully articulated example of a model of
communication from the Dialogic perspective is Clark's "collaborative
model" (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Clark & WilkesGibbs, 1986; Isaacs & Clark, 1987). Because the model is well specified, and
because Clark and his associates have been so active in pursuing the
collaborative model's empirical implications, it will be the primary focus of
our discussion of the Dialogic perspective. However, it should be kept in
mind that the collaborative model is only one of many possible
formulations of an approach that takes as its point of departure the
interactive nature of communication.
The fundamental premise of the collaborative model is that
communication consists of more than a sequence of messages produced by
the participants; rather, it emerges from the process by which speakers and
addressees come to agree that those messages have been understood. As
Clark and Brennan (1991) observe, collaboration is intrinsic to many forms
of human interaction:
It take two people working together to play a duet, shake hands, play
chess, waltz, teach, or make love. To succeed, the two of them have
to coordinate both the content and process of what they are
doing...Communication, of course, is a collective activity of the first
order.
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The collaborative processes required to create shared meanings are viewed
as essentially similar to those that underlie other forms of coordinated
behavior.
On important influence on Clark's thinking has been a subfield of
sociology specializing in the microanalysis of communicative interaction
called conversational analysis, a branch of ethnomethodology.
Ethnomethodologists focus on the common-sense knowledge people
invoke to explain and regularize social behavior -- the "artful practices," in
Garfinkel's (1967) term, that people use to obscure the chaotic reality that
constitutes social life (e.g., Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1972). The
central goal of conversational analysis is to describe and explicate the
competencies that ordinary speakers use and rely on when they participate
in intelligible, socially organized interaction. As Atkinson and Heritage
put it, "Conversational analytic studies are…designed to achieve systematic
analyses of what, at best, is intuitively known and…tacitly oriented to in
ordinary conduct" (Atkinson & Heritage, p. 4). Unfortunately, despite the
fact that conversational analysis deals with a number of topics of great
interest to social psychologists, there has been little contact between the
two fields.26 Many of the conversation analysts' theoretical ideas have been
formulated in psychological terms by Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) in
their collaborative model.
5.1.1 Collaborative Communication
A conversation can be viewed as a series of discursively-related
messages. According to Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), speakers and
hearers take pains to ensure that they have similar conceptions of the
meaning of each message before they proceed to the next one. The
collaborative model is specifically addressed to the problem of establishing
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definite reference (see Sections 3.2.1 and 4.1.2). Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs
contend that a successful act of reference has two phases: presentation, in
which an utterance is produced, and acceptance, in which the participants
come to agree that the message has been understood. Both phases are
viewed as collaborative in nature.
Presentation phase
Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs describe the feedback-eliciting strategies we
have discussed previously in Section 4.2.2 under perspective-taking (trymarkers, installment phrases, pre-sequences, etc.) as devices pairs of
communicators use to coordinate meaning. Speakers can actively solicit
the addressees' help in constructing an utterance, for instance by
encouraging spontaneous completions, as in the following example:
A:
Then I went to speak to Tom um...
B:
Smith?
A:
Yes. About the meeting next week.
In a large corpus of natural conversations, Clark Wilkes-Gibbs (1986;
Wilkes-Gibbs 1992, June) found widespread use of spontaneous
completions, as well as other interactive forms of reference. Completions
themselves are negotiated products: Speakers can accept or reject the
suggested term, as demonstrated in the following exchange from the
Wilkes-Gibbs corpus (1992, p. 4):
A:
It's a huge finding. It over...what's the word...
B:
Rides.
A:
No, um..uh..
B:
Shadows.
A:
Right. All the rest.
B:
Amazing.
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Wilkes-Gibbs notes that speakers sometimes appear to use the strategy of
hesitating to induce the listener to provide a completion, as for instance
when unable to recall another's last name (e.g., "Sure I recognize you.
You're John um...")
Acceptance phase
Once an utterance has been proposed, speaker and addressee interact
to ensure that they mutually agree it has been understood correctly. Clark
and his colleagues (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Clark &
Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) refer to this process as grounding:
The contributor and his or her partners mutually believe that the
partners have understood what the contributor meant to a criterion
sufficient for current purposes. This is called the grounding criterion.
Technically, then, grounding is the collective process by which the
participants try to reach this mutual belief (Clark & Brennan, 1991, p.
129).
In order for a statement to become a contribution to the ongoing
conversation, and thus to be incorporated into the communicators'
common ground, it must first be grounded.
The process of grounding an utterance can be more or less complex
and/or time consuming, depending upon its comprehensibility to the
listener and the goals of the communicators (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Clark
& Schaefer, 1989; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Schegloff, 1982; Schegloff,
1991; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Some messages are understood
and accepted immediately, either explicitly, as in:
A:
Have you heard of the movie Schindler's List?
B:
Uh huh.
A:
I saw it last night and it was quite a tear-jerker.
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or implicitly, as in:
A:
Last night John and I saw Schindler's List.
B:
Did you like it? I saw it last week and was really moved.
In Clark and Brennan's terms, backchannel responses that indicate
comprehension (e.g., "mhm," "I see,"), overt statements of understanding,
and moving on to the next turn without showing any indication of not
understanding are all "positive evidence" of sufficient grounding.
In contrast, listeners may sometimes indicate they have not
understood the message, or that they are not certain that their
interpretation is correct. These forms of "negative evidence" can also take
the form of backchannel responses (e.g., "huh?"), overt questions, and
misplaced or erroneous contributions. These backchannel signals can
initiate repair techniques, such as side-sequences:
A:
Last night John and I saw Schindler's List.
B:
The movie about the Holocaust?
A:
Yep.
B:
How did you like it?
The embedding of side-sequences need not be limited to two levels, and
can become quite complex (Jefferson, 1975). According to the collaborative
model, regardless of the number of turns required, communicators will
continue to try to establish that mutual understanding has occurred.
5.1.2 The Principle Of Least Collaborative Effort
The maxims of quantity and manner (Grice, 1975) ordain that
messages should contain the right amount of information for the addressee,
and be as concise as possible. The perspective-taking literature indicates
that speakers do in general follow these maxims, although apparent
violations are not uncommon. For example, Fussell and Krauss (1992)
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found that speakers would often present little or no identifying information
along with the name of a stimulus, despite their belief that it was unlikely
that the addressee could identify it from the name alone. Such findings
suggest that speakers do not adhere strictly to Grice's maxims.
Why might this type of maxim violation occur? According to
Intentionalists, providing one's addressee with too little information to
identify a referent could be understood as a deliberate act designed to
convey something to that addressee (e.g., that the speaker is being rude,
that the addressee is poorly informed, etc.). An alternative view is that
Grice's conversational maxims really are not very conversational in their
view of language. Rather they describe language use without taking into
account the interactive nature of interpersonal communication. Clark,
Wilkes-Gibbs and their colleagues propose that speakers and hearers strive
to minimize their collective effort in the grounding process. In this view, it
would be perfectly acceptable (i.e., not a maxim violation) for a speaker to
present a potentially ambiguous message, instead of a lengthier but more
communicative one, when less overall grounding time would be required
by having the listener disambiguate the latter message.
5.2 Research Findings
In their research, conversational analysts take segments of naturallyoccurring speech and transcribe them precisely -- retaining as much detail
of the original material (e.g., pauses, dysfluencies, intonations) as
possible.27 Psychological research guided by the collaborative model has
employed variants of the interactional referential communication
paradigm. In one variation, Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) had speaker
and hearer, separated from one another by a barrier, to converse without
constraint about stimuli, creating a conversational setting that contains
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many of the elements of everyday conversation, but still allows for
considerable experimental control. Consistent with their assumption that
communication, is achieved jointly by speaker and addressee, researchers
in the collaborative framework examine joint measures of communicative
success, such as the total number of words spoken or total time needed by
both parties to the conversation before they have agreed that successful
reference has occurred.
5.2.1 Developing Shared Perspectives
The number of conversational turns (presentation, acceptance, sidesequences) speakers and addressees require in any particular instance to
establish that a message has been understood can vary widely. In the
collaborative view, changes in this measure reflects the extent to which
speakers and hearers have established a joint perspective. Several studies
have demonstrated both that speakers' referring expressions become
shorter with repeated reference to a stimulus, but also that the total number
of speaking turns by both participants required to establish reference
declines over subsequent encounters with the referent. This is found when
the stimuli are nonsense figures (e.g., Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Hupet et
al., 1991; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992) and when they are actual persons,
places or things (e.g., Clark & Schaefer, 1987; Fussell & Krauss, 1992; Isaacs
& Clark, 1987; Schober & Clark, 1989).
Creating shared spatial perspectives
In earlier sections of the paper we discussed work on spatial
perspective-taking, and in particular, how consideration of the addressee's
viewpoint affects the way a speaker communicates about entities and
locations in a shared visual field. Several investigators have examined how
conversational partners create a joint perspective for spatial reference.
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Garrod and Anderson (1987) had dyads play a computerized maze
game that required them to refer to specific locations.
They found a
correlation between the relative use of particular locative strategies (e.g.,
path vs. coordinate systems) between each pair of partners, but not across
partners, suggesting that dyads had developed a joint spatial perspective
on the maze. Interestingly, attempts to coordinate perspectives explicitly
(e.g., "Let's describe them in terms of the maze coordinates,") were rare;
instead, coordination was achieved through the act of referring itself.
Garrod and Anderson suggest that communicators use
"output/input coordination" -- speakers formulate messages using the
mental model of the space that was used in the previous message. In this
way, they argue, cognitive effort is minimized because communicators do
not need to assess others' perspectives. However, research by Schober
(1993, 1992) suggests that communicators cooperate in the style of reference
they use to refer to physical locations, rather than in their specification of
those locations. In his studies, when pairs of communicators exchanged
speaking roles, the new director tended to use egocentric or addresseecentered references at about the same rate as the original director had.
Creating shared conceptual perspectives
As Schober (1990; 1993) observes, it may be easier to construct mutual
orientations toward a physical space than it is to create shared conceptual
perspectives, because in the former the addressee's point of view can more
readily be identified. In addition, although there is a conceptual element in
spatial perspective-taking -- different ways of referring to points in a maze
may indicate different ways of representing that maze in space -- typically
there will be little disagreement about the referred-to entity (e.g., a point).
In contrast, many communication tasks require that speakers and hearers
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develop a mutual perspective on both the object of reference and its
location in space, and in some cases, there may be no conventionalized
lexical entry for the object. In other cases, speakers and listeners may bring
different knowledge and perspectives on the referent to their interaction.
Researchers have examined the development of joint perspectives in both
of these cases.
Creating shared perspectives on unlexicalized referents
Several investigators have examined the construction of shared
perspectives or interpretations with Chinese Tangram figures (see Figure 2,
Panel B). Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) had pairs of subjects perform an
interactive referential communication task, and examined message content
and the length of exchanges across repetitive trials. Interactions became
briefer with subsequent mention. During the first trial, subjects described,
rather than named, the stimuli, employing four descriptive strategies:
resemblance (e.g., "looks like a skier"), categorization ("is a skier"), attribution
("has skis") and actions ("person skiing"). On the first trial, the majority of
speakers used a combination strategy: they gave a holistic label to the
stimulus, but added literal details to facilitate coordination of meaning.
With repeated mention, referring expressions are simplified and shortened
by eliminating details (e.g., "person with snowshoes carrying skis" might be
shortened to "skier"), or focusing on a particular part of a figure (e.g.,
"person carrying skis" might be shortened to "skis").
Collaborative models predict that addressees' coordination strategies
will also change across trials. During the initial trials, matchers in the Clark
and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) often requested expansion of the information
directors presented, and frequently proposed additional details to ensure
understanding. By the sixth trial, however, the directors' presentation was
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usually accepted without comment. Similar results have been found by a
number of investigators (e.g., Fussell & Krauss, 1992; Hupet et al., 1991;
Isaacs & Clark, 1987; Schober, 1993; 1994; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992).
Hupet et al. (1991) have shown that the amount of effort required to
achieve a shared perspective depends on the codability and
discriminability of the referent. When codability and distinctiveness were
high, Hupet et al. obtained results that paralleled those of Clark and
Wilkes-Gibbs (1986). However, when either of these factors was low, much
more interaction was required to establish that referents had been
identified correctly. By the sixth trial, dyads in all conditions of Hupet et
al.'s study were equally proficient at describing the Tangrams, suggesting
that, once established, a joint perspective is relatively easy to maintain,
even with confusable stimuli.
The collaborative process is also influenced by the extent to which
communicators bring similar personal perspectives on the stimuli to the
communication situation. Wilkes-Gibbs and Kim (1991) examined the
negotiation of perspective in a referential communication task patterned
after Carmichael, Hogan and Walter's (1932) classic study of the effects of
naming on memory. Wilkes-Gibbs and Kim created a set of ambiguous
Tangram-like figures that could be seen as different objects (e.g., "a camel
without legs," or "a barn with a silo," see Figure 4). In half of the dyads,
Wilkes-Gibbs and Kim induced the same perspective prior to the
communication task, and in the other half the two participants had
different perspectives. When the two communicators differed in their prior
perspectives, grounding was much more difficult and time consuming.
Nonetheless, as in Hupet et al.'s (1991) study, all pairs were able eventually
to construct a shared perspective.
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----------------------------------------------------------Insert Figure 4 About Here
----------------------------------------------------------Creating perspectives on lexicalized referents
Even when objects or concepts are lexicalized, speakers and hearers
need to coordinate on whether they will use names, descriptions, or a
combination of the two, and on the level of specificity of the names they
use. Collaborative processes are fairly straightforward when the
communicators share substantial background knowledge, but may be more
complex and time-consuming when participants have unequal expertise in
a particular domain. One strength of the collaborative model is its ability
to account for certain conversational phenomena that occur under such
circumstances. Not only do knowledgeable speakers tailor their messages
to their addressees' perspectives, they also collaborate to ensure that both
participants possess the same expertise, at least insofar as the task at hand
is concerned.
For example, Isaacs & Clark (1987) found that subjects who were
familiar with New York City frequently took an active role in teaching
novices the names of the landmarks that were the topic of their
communication. When directors had greater expertise, they tended to
begin by using the building's name plus a description, and then began
eliminating the descriptive information on repeated occasions of mention.
This finding is inconsistent with a straightforward Perspective-taking
account, which would predict that descriptions alone would be used for all
the trials, since the names would be uninformative to the addressee.
Similarly, when matchers had greater expertise than directors, they often
facilitated the discussion by introducing the name of the landmark.
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Not only do speakers modify their presentation strategies across
trials, they also adapt them to their matchers' needs within a single trial. In
Isaacs and Clark's (1987) study, experts on New York City were able to
assess their partners' familiarity with the city within the first few exchanges
of the first trial, and would modify their presentation strategies
accordingly. Schober (1994) also found that speakers' strategies for
describing spatial locations shifted somewhat during the first trial when
the matcher did not share the director's vantage point.
Collaboration is addressee-specific
Collaborative models predict that the shared perspectives
communicators develop during the course of a conversation will be
tailored to their own needs, and may not be comprehensible by others. In
support of this prediction, Stellmann and Brennan (1993) found that
speakers who had developed a mutual perspective on Tangram figures
with one partner would begin the grounding process anew when they
repeated the task with a second partner. In most cases, the prior
perspective was the one a offered by the speaker (and typically accepted by
the second partner), but perspective was introduced to the new partner as a
description rather than a label. When speakers were re-paired with their
original partners, they tended to use the names or descriptions they
previously had used with that partner.
Although directors must develop a new collaboration with each new
partner, the participatory status of the partner in earlier conversations is a
determinant of the collaborative strategy. Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark (1992)
had pairs of subjects perform a two phase referential communication task.
directors first communicated about Tangram figures with one partner, and
then performed the same task with a new partner, who had not been present
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during the first phase; a side-participant, who heard the earlier conversation
and saw the figures; a bystander, who heard the earlier conversation but
could not see the figures; or an "omniscient" bystander, who both saw the
stimuli and heard the earlier conversation via an audio-visual link.
Director's messages took into account the second partner's status in the
earlier conversation. For example, when the second partner had not been
present or was a bystander during Phase 1, messages tended to be long,
consistent with the notion that these pairs had not established a body of
common ground that would make previous referring expressions usable.
There is good reason to believe that directors' strategies during Phase
2 of the Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark's study affected the matcher's
understanding. Schober and Clark (1989) examined comprehension by
addressees and overhearers in a similar task, and found that overhearers
identified the intended referents significantly less accurately, especially
when they had not heard the entire conversation between director and
matcher. Similar findings have been reported by Kraut, Lewis and Swezey
(1982). Schober and Clark suggest that overhearer's poorer understanding
stems from several sources. First, people come to a conversation with
different background knowledge, and an overhearer whose background
knowledge differs markedly from the that of the addressee is likely to have
problems understanding message tailored to that addressee's perspective.
Second, overhearers who enter in the middle of a conversation will lack the
shared knowledge the participants have accumulated. Most importantly
from the collaborative perspective is that overhearers have not been
involved in the active construction of the utterance, and therefore, the
utterance is not grounded for them. Dyads may decide an utterance is
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suitably grounded, and move on to the next utterance before an overhearer
has understood the message.
Just as communicators adapt their collaborative procedures to take
addressee's prior status into account, they can also adapt their current
messages to take into account unintended and unwanted overhearers.
People often discuss matters they would prefer to keep confidential in
public places. In such cases, collaborative strategies may be considerably
more complex. Clark and Schaefer (1987) investigated pairs of
acquaintances' referring expressions for Stanford buildings in the presence
either of a person from whom they had to conceal their message, or
someone who was indifferent to what they were saying. Subjects used a
variety of strategies, often drawing upon private knowledge, to obscure
their message. Concealment made the collaboration process much more
difficult and time consuming, but it became easier over trials. However,
overhearers correctly identified the building about half of the time,
suggesting that it was difficult for the dyads to judge how successful their
concealment had been.28
5.3 Issues and Limitations
The Dialogic perspective stresses the ways in which meaning is
socially situated, and its emphasis on the interactive nature of
communication is appealing. Research motivated by this perspective has
done much to broaden our understanding of the mechanisms that make
communication possible, but, before it can offer a comprehensive account
of interpersonal communication, a number of issues need to be addressed
in specifically Dialogic terms. Some of these have been noted in our earlier
discussion of Perspective-taking models: the focus on reference to concrete
objects, and the lack of research on multi-party conversations in which all
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individuals are intended addressees. Here we raise two issues that are
particularly germane to a Dialogic approach..
5.3.1 Grounding errors
As speakers and hearers collaborate, they often find that one or the
other has made a mistake of some sort -- errors in word choice, intonation
contour, hesitations, and the like. Psycholinguistics has focused on the
cognitive sources of these errors, and the strategies speakers use to correct
them (see Clark, 1987; Gibbs, 1983). In conversational analysis, however,
Schegloff and his colleagues have described the procedures used by both
speaker and addressee to "repair" specific types of speech errors and
thereby maintain common ground (Schegloff, 1982; 1991; Schegloff et al.,
1977). Consistent with their theoretical stance, ethnomethodologists have
not explored the psychological underpinnings of errors and their corrective
mechanisms.
A Dialogic model hold that momentary errors in understanding must
be corrected before the conversation moves forward. Indeed, there is a
sense in which viewing them as errors is inconsistent with a Dialogic point
of view, since it implies an individualistic conception of meaning. In the
Dialogic view, an utterance has no meaning until the participants have
ratified it. So in a situation like the Isaacs and Clark experiment, a listener
who does not know the meaning of "the Chrysler building" (i.e., who does
not know what the Chrysler building looks like, and therefore cannot
identify a picture of it) can ask for more information. Indeed, it is the
responsibility of both speaker and addressee to ensure that successful
communication has occurred, and an error can occur only if the pair
proceeds to the next topic without adequately grounding the previous one.
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Of course, such errors do occur, and when they do they induce a processes
of retroactive reinterpretation (Fox, 1987).
Recent research by Kreuz and Roberts (1993) suggests that social
perceivers judge both speakers and hearers negatively when errors in
grounding occur. Unlike phonological and lexical errors, such errors,
(called pragmatic errors by Kreuz and Roberts) are not attributable solely to
the speaker. Rather, they appear to stem from a combination of factors: the
failure of a message to satisfy a conversational maxim (e.g., the messages is
not sufficiently informative), and the addressee's failure to make it known
to the speaker that such a failure has occurred. Only the speaker is held
responsible for phonological and lexical errors, but Kreuz and Roberts
found that both participants were judged negatively when pragmatic errors
occurred. In fact, the listener was judged even more negatively than the
speaker.
5.3.2 Individual and Socio-cultural Differences in Collaboration
Most of the research we have discussed has used college students as
subjects. Research on the generalizability of the model, and particularly on
communicators' grounding strategies, is sorely needed. The meager
evidence available suggests that populations may differ in the grounding
strategies they employ. Hupet et al. (1993) examined the communication
performance of students and elderly adults, using a task on which the
speaker and listener role was alternated. Although both subject groups
showed the characteristic decline in number of words and speaking turns
per figure across the six trials, the older adults required significantly more
words and turns. Hupet et al. were able to rule out a number of factor that
might account for their findings -- the two groups did not differ
significantly in verbal skills, nor did the types of queries received from the
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addressee differ, etc. However, they did find significant differences in the
directors' first turns in Trial 2: Whereas younger adults' descriptions of
each Tangram tended to be based at least in part on the description they
had grounded in Trial 1, about a quarter of the elderly subjects provided a
totally new name or description.29
Even within college student samples, there appear to be differences
in collaborative styles. Clark and Schaefer identified two subgroups whose
strategies of concealing their meaning from overhearers differed
substantially. One group settled on a private referring expression
immediately, while the other switched the basis for their expressions (i.e.,
the piece of private knowledge) from trial to trial. Not surprisingly, the
latter group found coordination more problematic.
5.3.3 Distinguishing collaborative from noncollaborative processes
Dialogically-oriented models like Clark's view individual
communicative behaviors in terms of their contribution to the joint
accomplishment of the participants. Of course, not all of the participants'
behaviors are part of the collaborative process. Participants in
conversations may simultaneously walk yawn, scratch themselves, toy
with a paper clip, etc., and it would make little sense to argue that
everything a participant does is ipso facto in furtherance of their joint
communicative effort. The problem is distinguishing between what is and
is not part of the collaborative process.
This becomes an issue when we consider a variety of speech-related
phenomena that are not ordinarily regarded as part of an utterance's
intended meaning. For example, consider the following answers to the
question "When was Abraham Lincoln born?"
(1) "Lincoln was born around 1820."
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(2) "Lincoln was born around…uh…1820."
An Intentionalist analysis would assume that (1) and (2) had the same
intended meaning, although the addressee might conclude, based on the
hesitation, that the speaker in (2) was less certain about Lincoln's birth date.
Suppose the speaker had said
(3) "This is only a guess, but I think Lincoln was born around 1820."
Do (2) and (3) have different intended meanings? An Intentionalist
analysis would say they did—that in (3) the speaker's lack of certainty was
part of the intended meaning, while in (2) the uncertainty was a conclusion
based on an inference external to the intended meaning. Now consider
sentence (4).
(4) "Lincoln was born around…uh…1820?" (with rising intonation)
Do (2) and (4) have different intended meanings? Intentionalist theorists
have not discussed the role of paralanguage in the construction of intended
meanings very extensively, but our guess is that, if pressed, they would say
that by using a rising intonation the speaker in (4) has made uncertainty
part of the intended meaning.
However, a Dialogic model might disagree. For example, with
respect to answering questions, Smith and Clark note the Gricean maxim of
quality ("Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence"), and
suggest that
"…when respondents aren't certain of their answer, they should say
so, or they will imply that they are certain."
…respondents use "uh" both to signal a delay and to offer a brief
account for it. In this view, "uh" is not merely a filled pause… It is a
deliberate signal chosen from a range of interjections that include
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"uh," "um," "hm," "mm," and the tongue click "ts" (Smith & Clark,
1992, pp. 26).
But if "uh" and "um" (both usually thought of as dysfluencies) are
"deliberate signals," can the same be said of other dysfluencies? Speech
often contains unfilled pauses, repeated words and syllables, and a variety
of other indicators that the engine of speech production is malfunctioning.
Are these signals as well? Of what? If filled pauses are signals, what do
we make of the finding that lectures in the humanities contain about twice
as many dysfluencies as lectures in the sciences (Schachter, Christenfeld,
Ravina, & Bilous 1991)? Are humanities instructors subtly alerting their
students to violations of the Gricean maxims?
We believe it is more useful to distinguish signs from symbols, and to
regard speech dysfluencies as signs—signs of (among other things)
difficulties the speaker has encountered in the speech production process.30
The problem may be encountered at the stage of conceptualization (e.g., the
speaker is having difficulty formulating the conceptual content of what is
to be conveyed) or at the stage of grammatical encoding (e.g., the speaker
can't access the word that adequately expresses that conceptual content), or
it may stem from other problems (distraction, fatigue, etc.). Participants in
conversations may or may not attend to such signs, depending on their
interaction goals, among other things. And they may or may not make
inferences from the signs, and use that information in the interaction.
To regard such signs as part of the participants' collaborative effort,
one must assume that participants have the same goals, something that
often is not the case. Although communication may be a collaborative
process, people often employ communication to accomplish ends that are
anything but collaborative. People sometimes violate the maxim of quality
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by saying things they know not to be true, intending that their addressee
belief the known-to-be-untrue proposition. In the vernacular, such
speakers are said to be lying or attempting to deceive the addressee. While
they may collaborate with their addressee to communicate, their goal in the
situation—the state they want to achieve through communication—
certainly is not shared by the addressee.
Lying sometimes is accompanied by subtle changes in speech. For
example, speakers' voice fundamental frequency may be elevated when
they say things they know to be untrue (Streeter, Krauss, Geller, Olson &
Apple, 1977). Similarly, Chawla and Krauss (1994) had professional actors
try to appear spontaneous while articulating speech they had rehearsed.
Spontaneous and rehearsed speech differed subtly in the location of
dysfluencies. It makes little sense to regard such signs as intentional, or
part of the collaborative process, since they undermine the very outcome
the speakers are trying to achieve. As we noted in Section 3.3.4, a
participant's behavior will reflect both illocutionary and perlocutionary
intentions. In many cases the signs we have been discussing derive from
speakers' perlocutionary intentions, and may provide a knowledgeable
observer with information about what a contribution is intended to
accomplish, rather than what it is intended to mean.
6. CONCLUDING COMMENTS
We have reviewed a sizable and remarkably diverse body of
literature concerned with the social psychology of interpersonal
communication. Our focus has been the implicit and explicit assumptions
that underlie different approaches to the topic, and we have formulated
these assumptions in terms of four models of communication. As with any
category system, the justification for ours is pragmatic, based on the extent
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to which it help us understand the similarities and differences among the
approaches investigators have adopted. Of course, category systems
inevitably tend to blur differences among instances of the same category
and to exaggerate dissimilarities among instances of different categories.
We are aware that we have grouped together studies that in some
important respects are quite different Also, because of limitations of space,
or because the work did not lend itself well to discussion in our format,
some relevant work has been omitted, or examined in scant detail.
Selectivity is unavoidable in reviewing any sizable content area, but with a
topic as multifaceted as communication it becomes a formidable problem.
Some readers no doubt will feel that we have given short (or no) shrift to
critically important work, and included items of dubious significance or
quality. Certainly we have not done this intentionally, but faced with the
charge we probably would plead nolo contendere.
It would be a serious misreading of our thesis to interpret what we
have written as an endorsement of one type of model over another -- as
saying that one provides a better account of interpersonal communication
than another does. The four models differ markedly in the kinds of
phenomena they have been designed to address, and each provides a
serviceable account of the phenomena that fall directly within its focus.
Moreover, each model takes a s a given the operation of processes
described by other models . Collaborative models, for example, locate
meaning within the interaction rather than within the message, but they
also regard try markers, installment noun phrases, and the like as signals
that are used to elicit feedback from the addressee. Presumably such
linguistic devices encode the information that a response is appropriate,
although Collaborative theories do not describe the encoding-decoding
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process in any detail. Hence, while each of the models offers important
insight into some aspects of interpersonal communication, each also has a
number of limitations when it comes to dealing with other aspects.
In this section, we will discuss briefly some of the open issues a social
psychology of interpersonal communication must address.
6.1. Identifying the Social Context
All of the approaches we have discussed take as a given that
communication is fundamentally a social process, but they conceive of the
social context of utterances in an exceedingly narrow fashion. With few
exceptions, researchers have focused on the immediate conversational
context, and ignored the wider social context in which the interaction is set
(Sarangi & Slembrouck, 1992).
There is reason to believe that many elements of the broader social
context affect both the form and content of messages. In his listing of
contextual factors (see section 3.1.3), Lyons (1977) includes social roles, time
and place of interaction, formality, style of speech, conversational topic and
situational domain. Most of these facets of the social context have yet to be
incorporated in communication models. To note just one factor, few
investigators have examined how the formality of the situation or the
relative status of interlocutors affects the communicative process, although
there is reason to believe these factors can have striking consequences. We
would expect workers to go to greater lengths assessing a supervisor's
perspective than the supervisor would in assessing theirs. And, as Sarangi
& Slembrouck (1992) point out, the extent to which the negotiation of
meaning is "collaborative" can depend on the relative status of the
communicators.
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Not surprisingly, sociolinguistically-oriented models have gone
considerably farther than the models we have reviewed in incorporating a
variety of dimensions of the wider social context. For example, speech
accommodation theory (Coupland, Coupland, Giles, & Henwood, 1988;
Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987; Thakerar, Giles, & Cheshire, 1982)
has attempted to delineate the social variables that determine the way
interactants adjust their speech to match that of their partners. To date, the
theory consists mainly of a listing of relevant variables, with little
description of the dynamic process by which interactants accommodate.
Regrettably, there has been relatively little cross-fertilization between
sociolinguistically-oriented models and models of the sort we have
described.
6.2 Nonlinguistic Aspects of Meaning
A comprehensive account of interpersonal communication must
explain how nonverbal and verbal information work in concert to create
meaning. Much of the research we have discussed either ignores
nonverbal sources of information or focuses on nonverbal and
paralinguistic cues as signs rather than symbols (see Section 1.2). For
example, Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986) discuss addressees' use of head
nods and the like to indicate comprehension.
By neglecting nonverbal and paralinguistic signs and symbols,
researchers may overlook important components of the processes they
examine. The taking of another's perspective, for example, can be revealed
not only in the words the speakers utter, but also in their tone of voice and
facial expression. A speaker relating bad news will convey an appreciation
of the addressee's perspective by selecting appropriate lexical items,
speaking in tone of voice associated with sadness (cf., Fairbanks &
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Pronovost, 1939), and displaying an appropriately somber facial
expression. Motor mimicry (e.g., displaying an expression that is
appropriate to the partner's emotional state) is one means by which
interactants convey their understanding of their partners' points of view
(Bavelas, Black, Lemery, & Mullett, 1986; Bavelas , Black, Chovil, Lemery,
& Mullett, 1988). It is reasonable to suppose that the absence of
appropriate nonverbal cues may lead an addressee to infer that an
utterance is in some way defective -- e.g., that it's not what it appears to be.
Judgments of subjects trying to determine which of two versions of the
same narrative was the spontaneous one were reliably correlated with the
rate at which the speaker displayed particular kinds of gestures and speech
dysfluencies (Chawla & Krauss, 1994). Interestingly, although subjects
were considerably more accurate than chance, they were unable to
articulate the clues they used to make their judgments.
6.3 Communication and Thought
Models of message production depict the process by which messages
are generated and have an effect on addressees. With few exceptions
(Zajonc,1960; Higgins, 1981), such models give little consideration to the
cognitive consequences of message production for the speaker. There is,
however, abundant evidence that creating a message can affect the way the
creator perceives, remembers and thinks about the message's contents.
Beginning with the classic experiment by Carmichael and his colleagues in
the 1930's, a substantial body of evidence has accumulated indicating that
labeling a stimulus affects its representation in memory (Carmichael,
Hogan, & Walter, 1932; Daniel, 1972; Thomas & DeCapito, 1966). Labeling
is one of the means by which communicators coordinate perspectives, and
Wilkes-Gibbs and Kim (1993) found that incorporating a particular
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perspective into the verbal label for an ambiguous figure affects the
speaker's subsequent memory for the figure. For example, subjects who
referred to a figure as a "camel," rather than a "barn with a silo," later overestimated the similarity of a camel-like figure to the original. Recent work
by Schooler and his colleagues (Fallshore & Schooler, in press; Schooler &
Engstler-Schooler, 1990; Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993) on "verbal
overshadowing" suggests a possible cognitive mechanism for such effects.
According to their recoding interference hypothesis, verbalizing a description
can produce a memory representation that is biased in the direction of a
particular perspective. Such representations can compete with other
representations in memory (e.g., visual) and affect recognition.
Interestingly, the effects of verbal overshadowing are not limited to visual
stimuli. Similar effects have been found for taste preferences and for
satisfaction with one's choices (Wilson, Lisle, Schooler, Hidges, Klaaren, &
LaFleur, in press; Wilson & Schooler, 1991).
Speakers' interpersonal attitudes and memory also can be affected
when they formulate messages about others. In a series of studies, Higgins
and his colleagues have shown that a speaker's attitudes toward, and
memory of, another person can be affected when the speaker tailors
messages to the perspective of an addressee (e.g., Higgins et al., 1981;
Higgins & Rholes, 1978; McCann, et al., 1991; see Kraut & Higgins, 1984;
Higgins 1992, McCann & Higgins, 1992 for a review of this work). In these
studies, speakers read brief personality sketches of a fictitious target
person, and then described him to an addressee who was said either to like
or to dislike him. Speakers tended to bias their characterizations of the
target's ambiguous traits in the direction of the addressee's attitude; he
might be described as persistent to an addressee who liked him, but stubborn
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to one who didn't. Subjects' subsequent recollections of these traits tended
to be distorted in the direction of their descriptions.
Krauss and Chiu (1993) have proposed a reformulation of the
traditional Whorfian view, contending that language use, rather than
linguistic structure, affects cognition. They hypothesize that particular
linguistic forms can be associated with specific mental representations, and
that using a particular form communicatively can create a representation in
the speaker's memory that may compete with other memorial
representations. Considered solely from the point of view of successful
reference, two alternative referring expressions may be equally effective.
In a group of five males and one female, either "That lady over there" or
"That woman over there" would enable the addressee to identify the
referent. However, if the meanings associated with lady and woman
differed in some important way, attributes of those meanings could become
part of the speaker's mental representation of the person referred to. A
corollary of this position is that factors that influence usage (i.e., that
determine the particular form a linguistic representation takes on a
particular occasion of use) can come to influence the way a speaker thinks
about the state of affairs under discussion. Since a large variety of factors
can determine the particular form a linguistic expression takes, the
potential implications of this point of view are quite far reaching. Recent
years have seen a rekindling of interest in the effects of language on
cognition (Hardin & Banaji, 1993; Hoffman, Lau, & Johnson, 1986; Hunt &
Agnoli, 1991; Hunt & Banaji, 1987; Kay & Kempton, 1984; Semin & Fiedler,
1991), but the topic may turn out to be better described as the effects of
communication on cognition.
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6.4 The Social Roots of Meaning
Rommetveit (1983) contends that much recent work in
communication, including research motivated by the Collaborative
approach, constitutes little more than minor elaborations of an
Encoding/Decoding model. Although his argument is not completely
persuasive, there is at least one respect in which Rommetveit's point is well
taken: All of the models we have discussed can accurately be characterized
as individualistic: they attempt to account for communication in terms of
the mental processes of individual speakers and hearers between whom
meaningful utterances are exchanged. Even those models that stress the
critical role interaction plays in clarifying speakers' intentions identify these
intentions as attributes of individuals. Rommetveit's argues that such
intentions are themselves socially constituted, and contends that "…no
authentic social psychology of language can be developed by adding
auxiliary notions about social-interactional features of verbal
communication onto such basic presuppositions" (1983, p. 94).
In contrast to this individualistic view, what we will call (for want of
a better term) a Fully Dialogic view would start from the assumption that,
quite apart from its expression, meaning is inherently social -- that it does
not reside solely in the mind of individual speakers and hearers (Bakhtin,
1981; Markova & Foppa, 1990; Rommetveit, 1974; Volosinov, 1986; Wold,
1992). One source of this view is Vygotsky's socio-genetic approach to
thought, which characterizes learning to think as a process of internalizing
external dialogues with significant others (Vygotsky, 1962; Wertsch, 1985).
These external dialogues take place in an intersubjective context (a state of
mutual orientation toward the other) that appears to exist from birth
(Braten, 1992; Trevarthen, 1992).
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For individualistically-oriented models, our perceptions of the world
are precursors to communication and exist independently of it. In the Fully
Dialogic view, however, our perceptions of the world derive from the state
of mutual orientation and the way we talk about the world. Volosinov31
writes
It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way
around -- expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives
experience its form and specificity of direction... Indeed, from
whichever aspect we consider it, expression-utterance is determined
by the actual conditions of the given utterance -- above all, by its
immediate social situation. (1976, p. 85, italics in original).
The distinction between this view and those discussed earlier may be
seen in an example. Consider the ambiguous Tangram figure in Figure 5.
A Perspective-taking view yields the prediction that a speaker would tend
to describe the figure as a "barn with silo" when talking to a farmer, but as
a "camel" when talking to a zoo keeper. In contrast, a Fully Dialogic model
would predict that a speaker would be more likely to perceive the figure as
a barn with silo or a camel, depending on whether the conversational
partner was a farmer or zoo keeper. The difference between the two
positions is not trivial. A Fully Dialogic view gives communication a
preeminent role in the construction of mind. Intriguing as this notion is,
and broad though its implications may be, it has proved difficult to
formulate in an empirically testable way. We know of no research that has
addressed it directly.
*
*
*
Recent years have seen a growing appreciation by social
psychologists of the importance of understanding the role interpersonal
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communication plays in the phenomena they study. We anticipate that
examining the role of communication will deepen our understanding of
these phenomena, but we also believe that these explorations will
contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms by which interpersonal
communication is accomplished. And these insights, in turn, will be
incorporated into theoretical models of the communication process. We
are, therefore, relatively optimistic about the prospects for achieving a
more comprehensive and systematic social psychological understanding of
interpersonal communication.
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FOOTNOTES
†
We are grateful to C-Y Chiu, Curtis Hardin, E. Tory Higgins, Julian Hochberg, Roger
Kreuz, Arie Kruglanski, Lois Putnam, Josef Schrock, and Michael Schober for comments,
suggestions and thoughtful discussions of the issues raised in this chapter. Of course, the au
alone are responsible for its contents, and for any errors of either omission or commission.
During the period this chapter was written, Krauss's work received support from National
Science Foundation grant SBR-93-10586.
1
In what is the classic definition, Allport defined social psychology as:
...an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of
individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others
(A
1954, p. 3, italics in original).
Some more recent definitions have defined social psychology in terms of its subject
matter -- social behavior. ("…the scientific study of social behavior," Sears, Peplau, & Taylor
1991, p. 2); "…the systematic study of the nature and causes of human social behavior,"
Michener, DeLamater, & Schwartz, 1990, p. 5). Given the difficulty of defining social behavio
with any precision, these definitions do not seem to improve on Allport's. Brown (1986),
probably wisely, refrains from offering a definition.
2
These and other conversational principles will be discussed in Section 3.
3
See Section 3.2.3 for a discussion of work on the role of perceived intentions in
research.
4
The "more-or-less " is a hedge, intended to signal that the matter is not quite so simp
All but a very few words bear an arbitrary relation to their meaning, but for nonverbal symbols
the relation of symbol to thing signified is often non-arbitrary to some degree. The connection
may be historic (the cross is a symbol of Christianity because of its association with the
crucifixion), iconic (the X used on highway signs to signify a railroad crossing resembles a
crossing), or what for want of a better term might be called "abstractly representational" (the
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number of stars and stripes in the American flag stand for certain historical facts about the
nation). The point is that, whatever its origin, the
meaning-in-use of the symbol becomes
detached from its original connection with what it signifies, and comes to stand for the thing
itself in an immediate way. People do not see a cross and say to themselves "Because of the
cross's role in the story of the crucifixion it is associated with Christianity. Therefore it is used
mean or represent Christianity." Rather, the cross has come to signify Christianity in the sam
way that a hexagonal sign signifies "Stop!", and
kick the bucket means "die." The historica
reasons for the associations are largely irrelevant to the communicative function.
5
Of course, the intended meaning of a symbolic display may not be clear. The Americ
flag is a symbol, but often it is displayed under circumstances that lead one to wonder what
message the display is intended to convey — perhaps that the displayer is a loyal citizen,
diffusely patriotic, or just the kind of person who displays the flag. In the terms of speech act
theory (Austin, 1962; Bach & Harnish 1979), the illocutionary force of the act is indeterminate
Of course, the same can be said of certain utterances.
6
This is not to say that facial expressions are typically duplicitous. On many (perhaps
most) occasions, what one wants others to believe one is experiencing is what one really is
experiencing, and the expressive behavior will be an accurate reflection of the person's intern
experience.
7
Again, the situation is not quite so simple. Although pitch and loudness are affected
a speaker's emotional state, variations in pitch and loudness also can serve syntactic function
Particular prosodic contours are associated with sentence types (e.g., a rising contour with
interrogative sentence, etc.), and stressing particular words can affect the implicit presupposi
that underlie the sentence's understood meaning (compare
there tomorrow").
"I'll be there tomorrow" vs. "I'l
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8
The term code is used by linguists, sociolinguists, and others concerned with langua
in a variety of rather different ways (cf., Bernstein, 1962; Bernstein, 1975; Ellis, 1992; Ellis &
Hamilton, 1988). We will use the term to refer to the general notion of a mapping system.
9
We will use the terms "speaker" and "listener," "addressee," or "hearer" to refer to the
initiator and recipient of a message in any communication modality (spoken, written, etc.).
10
Of course there are areas of psychology in which the quantitative indices that the
information theory provides are of great utility (Attneave, 1959; Hick, 1952; MacKay, 1983;
Young, 1987). The point here is that, despite the initial enthusiasm, its application in the stud
of interpersonal communication in general and language in particular has been disappointing
11In
their Linguistic Category Model, Semin and Fiedler
(1992) draw a somewhat
different set of distinctions. They differentiate two kinds of IA verbs: descriptive action verbs
(DAVs) and interpretive action verbs (IAVs). DAVs (e.g., shove, caress)
singular behavioral episodes. IAVs (e.g., deceive, compliment)
but in a less concrete fashion (one can deceive
distinguish between state action verbs
action of an agent (e.g.,
refer to concrete
also refer to singular episo
in a great many ways). Semin and Fiedler
(SAVs), which refer to a state caused by a specifia
surprise, bore), and state verbs (SVs), referring to states that ordi
cannot be identified with a specifiable action (e.g.,
admire, despise). SAVs and SVs corr
to S-E verbs and E-S verbs, respectively .
12The
issue of what constitutes a communicative intention in psychological terms is
unclear, and beyond the scope of this chapter. For present purposes, we will assume that an
intended message is one that the speaker meant to convey. We will leave as an open quest
the level of consciousness at which such intentions or plans occur.
13Defining
relevance has proved to be problematic, and a number of different
formulations have been offered (e.g., Berg, 1991; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Here, we will us
rough definition of relevance in terms of the relationship of an utterance to previous utterance
(e.g., is it on the same topic, does it address the question?) However, Berg argues that it is n
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the relationship between
utterances that defines relevance but rather the extent to which
successive utterances address participants' goals.
14One
strength of the Gricean perspective is that it allows for infinite flexibility and
creativity in language use. As Levinson (1983, p. 112) observes,
One general point that ... exploitations of the maxims raises is that there is a fundamen
way in which a full account of the communicative power of language can never be
reduced to a set of conventions for the use of language. The reason is that wherever s
convention or expectation about the use of language arises, there will also therewith a
the possibility of the non-conventional exploitation
of that convention or expectation
follows that a purely conventional or rule-based account of natural language usage can
never be complete, and that what can be communicated always exceeds the
communicative power provided by the conventions of the language and its use.
15
The locutionary and illocutionary force of an utterance correspond roughly to Grice's
sentence meaning and utterance meaning.
16
Listeners' ability to distinguish between different sentence forms of the same indirec
request is sometimes presented as evidence that literal sentence meaning is processed prior
indirect meaning, as the three-stage model argues. However, as Holtgraves (1994, footnote
correctly notes, such politeness judgments do not rule out the possibility that literal meaning i
determined simultaneously (or even after) indirect meaning. It is also possible, as Holtgraves
points out, that different forms of indirect requests are more or less idiomatically polite and m
be judged without computing their literal meaning.
17Since
excellent recent reviews of this work are available (Hilton, in press; Schwarz,
1994), we will not describe it in great detail here.
18
It might be helpful if researchers distinguished between two states of affairs: shared
knowledge or common ground— knowledge that each participant possesses, but may or ma
realize that the others possess (hence, people come to discover their common ground throug
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discussion), and mutual knowledge — the special case of situations that meet the stronger
mutually reflexive criterion specified by Clark and Marshall.
19
Schober (1993) distinguishes between
spatial perspective taking, which concern
assessing another's physical point of view with regard to an object or location, and conceptu
perspective taking, which has to do with assessing knowledge, beliefs, etc. However, the two
not completely independent. Effective use of such locative statements as "right in front of yo
to identify an object's position rests equally on an assessment of the object's position relative
the addressee and an assessment of the addressee's ability to apprehend the referent visua
20
Kogan also reports that middle-aged adults used longer messages for other middle-
aged adults than for elderly adults, which is surprising since most studies have found
figurativeness and length to be negatively correlated.
21
Interestingly, when the subject described the target for a second person after a wee
delay, these effects were not found. McCann et al. argue that the initial descriptions altered t
speaker's own view of the target over the course of the week, an interpretation that is consist
with their previous work in this area. The finding suggests, as Graumann (1990) observes, th
perspective-setting (stating one's own view) may be as important as perspective-taking,
especially where attitudes are concerned.
22
Virtually all studies of solo speakers' messages across a series of trials have found
message length rarely decreases across trials and sometimes actually increases, unlike
communicators in conversational contexts (Fussell, 1990, Experiment 2; Schober, 1992, 199
23
Unfortunately, in the Traxler and Gernsbacher experiments, the set of distracters wa
not known by the writers. Hence, it is possible that their results reflect writers' growing
appreciation of the reader's
24
task rather than an increasingly accurate view of the addressee
These studies still beg the question of how subjects make their assessments. We h
proposed a number of mechanisms -- reasoning from knowledge of one's acquaintances (Da
1989), from subjective familiarity, or from ease of recall. In addition, it is not completely clear
Models of Interpersonal Communication
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what subjects' percentage ratings in these situations represent. Response scales are typical
intervals of ten percent or so. As Yaniv & Foster (1991) point out, judgments of likelihood va
in specificity. A person's estimated time of arrival might characterized as "late afternoon,"
"fivish" or "5:12 pm." Yaniv & Foster label this variation "graininess" of judgment. The same
graininess applies to judgments about others' perspectives. For instance, someone might jud
the probability a non-New Yorker would be able to recognize the Guggenheim museum as
"better than 50%," "60-70%," or "62.5%". Little is known about the precision with which
communicators make such judgments, but it is likely that graininess will vary depending upon
such factors as the topic domain, the ability to correct erroneous first attempts at message
formulation, the precision required by the task, etc. As Yaniv and Foster note, there is a trad
involved in specificity of judgments: the more precise one is, the more informative one's
judgment; however, the more likely one also is to be wrong.
25Pinker
(1994, p. 19) calls language "…a biological adaptation to communicate
information," but neither he nor other biologically-oriented language theorists give much
consideration to the way language was shaped by the circumstances in which it evolved. It is
commonplace of evolutionary theory that biological systems evolve to function in a specific se
of circumstances, or ecological niche. Such considerations account for (among other things)
way the visual systems of eagle and frog differ (Walls, 1963). If language evolved primarily to
serve communicative needs in face-to-face interaction, it would not be surprising that its featu
were adapted for communication in that particular setting. However, the main thrust of
contemporary linguistic theory, with its emphasis on idealized competence models of product
and comprehension, seems oblivious to the implications of this possibility.
26
Two collections of articles (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Drew & Heritage, 1992)
provide a good introduction to research in the CA tradition.
27
It is part of the conversational analyst's methodological canon that analyses must be
based on naturally–occurring corpora drawn from everyday interaction. They eschew
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hypothetical examples, responses to an interviewer's questions, interactions whose primary
purpose is to provide data, and, perhaps especially, experiments. They also tend to be indiff
about issues of control, representativeness, and selection bias. This may account for the lac
contact between social psychology and conversational analysis, despite their interest in simil
phenomena (cf., Krauss, 1988)..
28
Eavesdroppers in such public places as restaurants and elevators may understand
good deal more than others think. It also may be the case that communicators pay less atten
to some categories of potential eavesdroppers than others. The novelist E. Annie Proulx
describes her own experience:
"…I can sit in a diner or a cruddy little restaurant halfway across the country, and there
will be people in the booth next to me, and because I'm a woman of a certain age, they'll say
anything as if no one were there. People will say absolutely outrageous, incredible things. I
once overheard people talking about killing someone" (Rimer, 1994, p. C10).
It's not clear whether speakers don't bother to conceal what they are saying from older
eavesdroppers because they do not notice them (as Proulx hypothesizes) or because they be
the common ground is insufficient for comprehension.
29
Since the subjects were similar in terms of memory span and other cognitive and
linguistic skills, Hupet et al. argue that this tendency to create new descriptions rather than us
the prior common ground might be due to elderly subjects being distracted by other thoughts
However, a number of plausible alternative explanations suggest themselves. Elderly subjec
may have thought that the experimenter intended for them to create new descriptions, or they
may have felt more freedom to modify the description to suit their own conceptions of the
stimuli. In addition, student populations probably are more homogeneous than the one from
which the elderly were drawn, and, as a result, students may have been better able than the
elderly to assess the addressee's perspectives.
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30The
distinction is analogous to that discussed in Section 1.2 between blushing and
saying "I'm embarrassed." In some sense both "messages" are the same, but the means by
they are conveyed are quite different
31
Many believe that the works on literary theory published under Volosinov's name
actually were written by Mikhail Bakhtin. However the name was not a
nom de plume; V
Volosinov, a Russian writer and intellectual, was a member of Bakhtin's circle. Regardless o
whether Volosinov wrote the works that bear his name, there is little doubt that the ideas they
express bear the stamp of Bakhtin's thinking, and reflect themes that can be found in both hi
earlier and later writings. For a biography of Bakhtin and a detailed treatment of his theorizin
see Clark & Holquist (1984); for a brief sketch, see Lodge (1990, pp. 1-10).
Table 1: Grice's Cooperative Principle and its associated Conversational
Maxims.
The Cooperative Principle:
Make your conversational contributions such as is
required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you
are engaged.
Maxims of Conversation
1. Quantity
i. Make your contribution as informative as is required
(for the current purposes of the exchange).
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ii.
Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required.
2. Quality
i. Do not say what you believe to be false.
ii.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence.
3. Relation
i. Be relevant.
4. Manner
i.
Avoid obscurity of expression.
ii.
Avoid ambiguity.
iii. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
iv.
Be orderly.
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Table 2. Sample of utterances that can be used with the illocutionary force
of a request to "shut the door." (Adapted from Levinson, 1983, p. 264.)
1. Close the door.
2. Can you close the door?
3. Would you close the door?
4. It might help to close the door.
5. Would you mind awfully if I asked you to close
the door?
6. Did you forget the door?
7. How about a bit less breeze?
8. It's getting cold in here.
9. I really don't want the cats to get out of the
house.
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FIGURE 1
Schematic illustration of the Encoding/Decoding model.
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Panel A
Panel B
Panel C
Figure 2
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Examples of three types of stimuli used in referential communication
studies.
Models of Interpersonal Communication
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Looks like a Martini glass
with legs on each side
10
8
Words per
Reference
6
Martini glass with the legs
Martini glass shaped thing
4
Martini glass
Martini
2
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Trial
FIGURE 3
Illustration of the process by which the referring expression for an
innominate figure becomes shortened over a the course of successive
references.
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Original Stimulus
Label A
Label B
"barn with silo"
"camel"
FIGURE 4
Example of an ambiguous figure used by Wilkes-Gibbs and Kim (1991)